Sunday, April 1, 2007

Help file generation for framework 2.0

After reading Tal's post on the subject I decided to look into generation of code documentation myself.

As promised in Sudheer Kumar's post, the binaries of NDoc2005 failed to run, so I had to download the source and compile it.
However, once testing it with a method which receives a generics List of strings as a parameter, the documentation showed only an untyped List - so I guess NDoc is not really framework 2.0 friendly (at least generics is not fully supported).

So I moved on to the Sandcastle help file builder (found here), which took a long time to run (I used it on a "hello world" type application) and required a web connection, but produced a CHM file looking a lot better than NDoc's outpost. You need to download the latest Sandcastle installer for it to work.
(You also need to enable xml documentation file creation in your project properties)

I also ran into a nice tool, called Quickdoc viewer, which you can use if you really dislike XML and would like to see code comments as a standard help file while coding.

1 comment:

Adi said...

Current link for QuickDoc viewer is at http://www.kyrsoft.com/downloads/downloads.html#Quickdoc