Microsoft Sandcastle
As a former NDOC user, I appreciate the urgency of shipping correct and detailed API reference documentation. I think few will argue aside from elegance of the consumer API surface, a critical component of any application framework is its API reference documentation.
Recently, I've been working with a pre-release of a new Microsoft product named Sandcastle, which is a set of command-line executables and several assemblies used to generate either CHM or HXS API reference documentation from the documentation file generated by the C# compiler.
Sandcastle generates documentation using the following overall process:
- Use the "/doc" compiler option to generate an XML documentation file.
- Run the assemblies through Sandcastle (MRefBuilder, XslTransform, and BuildAssembler) to produce a set of HTML files.
- Generate resulting help using the Microsoft HTML Help Compiler. The help compiler version 1.0 is used to produce CHM files and version 2.0 is used to generate HXS files.
Several of the XSLTs and the CSS that shipped with my build needed a few minor modifications to produce MSDN-style documentation but overall the architecture is quite nice.
It'll be great to see how well it's received by the developer community. At the time of this writing, the Sandcastle team is targeting a CTP for next week or so.