Does Visual Studio contain built in documentation building tools that can build MSDN style documents?

Question

I'd like to generate HTML documentation for my project. Does anyone know of any good tools that would be good for this.

Answer 1

Nope, you will have to download separate tools for that. I believe most people (including Microsoft?) use Sandcastle for documentation building.

NDoc was another tool, but it is only compatible with .NET 1.1

Answer 2

Doxygen is another option.

Visual Studio does generate the basic xml for you, so you could also just apply an xslt to it.

Answer 3

First step in building MSDN-like help files is to generate the XML documentation from code. To do that you have to comment all your code using standardized comment policy (The exact name of the concept is eluding me at the moment). Basically you have to comment the code using "///" notation (for C#). See this article for reference.

After commenting all your code, use the Project properties window (Build tab) to activate XML documentation generation and pick and output file.

With this XML at hand you can now generate HTML help files like MSDN ones. I saw you already got 2 recommendation and I am adding another (open source) one that I used : Ndoc