Documenting WCF Web Services

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Documenting WCF Web Services

I would like to create/generate documentation from (somewhat)RESTful WCF Services. By somewhat RESTful I mean the client will use HTTP GETs and HTTP POSTs to communicate with the server (limited to just these verbs due to hardware limitations)

I like the way Twitter released their documentation: http://dev.twitter.com/doc/get/statuses/user_timeline

Are there any tools or suggestions for creating similar documentation for WCF Services? Thanks.

With .NET 4, WCF REST has gotten a new feature - automatic help pages. That would seem to do more or less what you're interested in doing. Unfortunately, I don't know if there's any way to leverage this functionality for .NET 3.5 ....

Update: yes, you can provide a custom description on those automatic help pages. See Clients and the automatic Help Pages (towards the end of the page) or the MSDN docs on Web Http Help Page for some input on how to achieve that.

marc_s 2010-08-04 05:11:57

I am actually using .NET 4 and I do have the help pages. I was hoping for a little more control, for instance do you know if I could edit the "Description" or add a short paragraph per service?

Sean 2010-08-04 14:50:07

@Sean: updated my answer - yes, you can put a `[Description(....)]` attribute on your services and operations to provide custom descriptions

marc_s 2010-08-04 15:23:30

@marc_s: Thanks. This answers the question but I think I'm just going to write a custom site for our API. I was hoping for more control with the content/styling but this was really useful.

Sean 2010-08-05 12:38:23

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Documenting WCF Web Services

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