Anyone using nDoc or a similar tool to help with system documentation?

Question

I'm looking at a few tools to help improve my documentation process, and nDoc came up during a discussion with another developer. Any suggestions or tools you might recommend?

Answer 1

Check out SandCastle if you use Visual Studio

Answer 2

I'm assuming you're using C# since you're mentioning NDoc. Unfortunately, when generics was introduced in C# and .NET, NDoc went the way of the dodo.

There is another tool, however, that will do what you want:

• Sandcastle Blog
• Sandcastle Codeplex Repository

There's also a GUI tool that can be used to produce configuration files for it that looks like NDoc:

• Sandcastle Help File Builder

Answer 3

If you want to improve your documentation process, telling us about your current process may help :)

Answer 4

Recently I found a list of documentation tools on the web site www.sandcastledocs.com SandCastle was mentioned by other posts, so I will not repeat it.

Some links were broken, so I fixed it, and here is the list with my comments. I also put a price for 1 license (without subscription and source codes). Prices could be changed by their vendors, so here is what they list for today (29.Jul.2009):

DocumentX - http://www.innovasys.com/products/dx2008/overview.aspx $493 - they say that Infragistic and Dundas use their tool. So it is not very expensive, and probably worth to be considered when you have really big documentation set that SandCastle cannot eat.

nDoc - http://ndoc.sourceforge.net/ - Free, Outdated, not supported anymore. We use it until now (and we made some pathes in source codes ourself). However now we will drop it in favor of SandCastle

Doc-O-Matic - http://www.doc-o-matic.com/ EUR 740 for Profeccional license, damn expensive, but they also have free comand line tool Doc-O-Matic Express. They promise to be 10 times faster then SandCastle . And they also support C/C++ and Delphi

DOxygen - http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/ - this used in our C++/multiplatform projects (and probably will be used further because SandCastle is a tool for .NET and Windows). But it cannot produce Help2.0 output, that is why for out .NET project we will use SandCastle.

Doc-to-Help - http://www.componentone.com/SuperProducts/DocToHelp/ 1000$ even more expensive! I know that components from componentone is usually a high quality products, but I wonder what features they should have to put such a big price.

VSdocman -В http://www.helixoft.com/vsdocman/overview.html 229 $ a small price but currently I don't see real advantages over SandCastle except it integrates with VS, but there are community add-ins for SandCastle on CodePlex, so it is not a big advantage I think.

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So, a brief conclusion: for SandCastle we currently satisfied with its features (together with SHFB), we like that is is an opensource product, and believe that this tool will evolve (MS promises to update it with new features as soon as .NET 4.0 will be released, so it will support .NET 4.0 features). However it has bad performance (one of our projects take > then 30 minutes to generate help while only 3 minutes to build) and also if you want to customize the output you will have to learn more about internals of its templates and plugins, but this is not an easy task. It would be great to have more documentation about templates and presentations.

Answer 5

Hello,

I have just forked NDoc v1.3.1 and updated it so the JavaDoc output works with Visual Studio 2008. Importing from solution or project files doesn't work yet, you have to add assemblies with the add button.

Check it out on github: http://github.com/pcpratts/NDoc4