How to format Visual Studio XML documentation for display on the web

Question

I am using Visual Studio 2010 and have started being a good boy and documenting all my code as I write it, via XML comments. I have a well-documented project and I even figured out how to make Visual Studio spit out a complete XML document when doing a build. My question is, what is the best way to format/display this document on the web so that it appears in a nice friendly and usable format like MSDN? Is there a tool that does this easily?

Thanks in advance!

Solution 1

Check out Sandcastle Help File Builder. This is a GUI tool that makes Sandcastle pretty easy to work with. It will install to a folder in Start Menu->Program Files->Sandcastle Help File Builder.; It's pretty easy to use, but it's not incredibly fast.

Hope that helps!

Solution 2

Check out Sandcastle.

Sandcastle produces accurate, MSDN style, comprehensive documentation by reflecting over the source assemblies and optionally integrating XML Documentation Comments.

Wikipedia has more information and links to additional projects that integrate with sandcastle.

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Another option (which appears to be much easier to use) is docu:

A documentation generator for .Net that isn't complicated, awkward, or difficult to use. Given an assembly and the XML that's generated by Visual Studio, docu can produce an entire website of documentation with a single command.

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A third option is NDoc:

NDoc generates class library documentation from .NET assemblies and the XML documentation files generated by the C# compiler (or with an add-on tool for VB.NET).

NDoc uses pluggable documenters to generate documentation in several different formats, including the MSDN-style HTML Help format (.chm), the Visual Studio .NET Help format (HTML Help 2), and MSDN-online style web pages.

Comments

[Chev]

That's funny, that's the first one I encountered. It seemed rather cumbersome. I don't think it reads from the generated XML document, instead it reads from the .cs files themselves. This is one option for sure, but I'd like to see if anyone else has other options to put forward.

[Oded]

@Chevex - it's been the king for years... I have updated my answer with another option.

[Chev]

I want to use sandcastle but it's confusing me quite a bit. I installed it but have no clear where it went. Does it have a GUI?

[Oded]

@Chevex - It is notoriously difficult to use. See the other options I added. docu looks like a good one.

[Chev]

Docu generates an error whenever I try to use it, unfortunately. It says it encountered a user-defined breakpoint. However that's possible.

[Chev]

I wish I could just find a good fool-hardy tutorial for using sandcastle. It is installed and I still have no idea where to even access it's options.

[Chev]

I managed to get this to create documentation during Visual Studio's build event. Check out my answer on this question: stackoverflow.com/questions/211693/…

[Reza Mortazavi]

Seems promising but no activity in the past 4 years.