Sandcastle Distinguishes Between Debug and Release Builds?

Question

I fired up Sandcastle Help File Builder today to generate documentation for my solution, which has around a dozen projects in it. Since I only want to generate documentation for, and run Sandcastle after, a Release build (which excludes all my test projects), I selected "Release" at the top of the window, just like in VS. Sandcastle appropriately looks for the gen'd XML files in my \bin\release subfolders for each project. However, it errors out when it cannot find DLL's for my test projects. It apparently sees those projects in the solution file, but doesn't realize I don't have builds for them in Release. I tried de-selecting them in the "API Filter" property, but this doesn't change anything.

How can I get Sandcastle to ignore those projects?

Answer 1

SHFB is nice, I've been using it recently. It turns out that there are a number of ways you can specify documentation sources. One way is by selecting the solution, as you seem to have done. You can also choose the project files for just the projects you are interested in documenting. You can even choose the resulting assemblies as sources.

Try changing the docu source from the solution to just the projects you are interested in. It doesn't quite answer your question, but it is a workaround, since you fairly likely have no need to document your test projects.