How to document a ASP.net website ?

Question

I have released a ASP.net website. How to document it ? Is there any tools available in VS2008?

How it can be achieved ? Please help?

Answer 1

Any automatically-generated documentation is useless, in my opinion. Unless you are ready to take your time and describe high-level decisions, structure, code organization and other issues personally, you can safely omit this part.

Answer 2

As it has mentiond good documentation can't be automated. So you can use MS Word. And for any kinds of diagrams I would use MS Visio.

Answer 3

I found this tool, they offer a free trial version. I never used it. Maybe it will help you.

http://www.innovasys.com/products/dx2008/overview.aspx

Quotes from the site:

"Document! X automates the process of creating and maintaining documentation for a wide range of solution elements."

"With Document! X, documentation can be automatically produced throughout design and development without requiring investment of developer resources, providing development teams with an accurate and up to date reference and allowing new developers to jump the learning curve of new components and schemas. Document! X makes producing documentation a natural and productive activity for developers and technical writers alike."

This is a quote from other site about the same tool:

"New features included in Document! X 2008 include compatibility with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, documentation of ASP.NET Ajax Javascript and new templates to replicate the fresh look and feel of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 documentation."

Answer 4

What do you need to document?

• The design? You can use sandcastle to generate a code file from the XML comments in your source code. Providing a detailed description of design choices and architecture can't be automated and requires time to document. Provide workflows where necessary to explain processes. You might want to split this document into high level design and detailed design, providing an overview of functionality and then a detailed description of the design. Don't replicate or explain the actual code per se (i.e. "using an integer counter, loop through..."), that's what the source is for.

• The application usage? Again, this is something that you will need to spend timing writing. Hopefully you already have a functional specification and use cases for the application and can leverage these to write a user document.