What are some good .NET code documentation tools?

Question

What are some good .NET code documentation tools?

Any good documentation tools which are free and you can have online documentation for your .NET code would be useful.

Answer 1

What is it you need to get out? Sandcastle is meant to do much of this - I don't know how complete it is, though. It uses reflection and any code documentation files (.xml files from the /// comments).

Answer 2

GhostDoc (http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/) is a good tool for writing summary tags in your code.

It will look at your names of the items you are documenting and try to figure out a good starting description. It is a useful tool to start consistently documenting your code.

I don't the names off the top of my head but then there are tools to pull out the summery tags into xml and html. The tools will make an MSDN like site for your API. It is a pretty good system but it is up to the developer (you) to document you code.

Answer 3

Ghostdoc is great for easily adding comments to your code with the least amount of effort

Answer 4

Sandcastle Help File Builder is a useful front end for Sandcastle. You can also look into using Doxygen.

HTH, Kent

Answer 5

Sandcastle is very capable provided you use the Sandcastle Help File Builder which is GUI wrapper around the Sandcastle tools, which are not that trivial to use. The GUI makes it easy.

One problem with Sandcastle is that generating a complete documentation can be quite memory intensive and generally takes longer than using NDoc. NDoc is now a discontinued project stuck in .NET 1.0, but you can still use the tweaked NDoc2 Alpha which CAN process .NET 2.0 assemblies and source. For newer versions of the framework, Sandcastle is the only way to go, though.

Another good thing about Sandcastle, however, is that it can also be used to generate conceptual documentation for your projects using MAML.

Answer 6

I had a presentation about Code contracts last week. Its a really great way of .NET 4.0 to document your code. Nobody ready documentation anyway. But with code contract you see code and document the same time

see: http://codebetter.com/blogs/matthew.podwysocki/archive/2008/11/08/code-contracts-and-net-4-0-spec-comes-alive.aspx

Answer 7

Question has been asked before.

Answer 8

All you need is here: http://www.helixoft.com/vsdocman/overview.html

Regards!!!

Answer 9

I recently started an open-source project for this purpose, as an alternative to Sandcastle. This isn't the place to discuss why I've done this, but you might want to take a look at the site and see if it's of interest. It's only in alpha, and it doesn't yet support all the documentation tags, but it's making steady progress.

Docu - simple documentation done simply

Answer 10

A powerful free alternative to GhostDoc is available here: http://www.atomineer.com/AtomineerUtils.html

This works for a very configurable range of DocXml and Doxygen format comments, and for C, C++. C# and Java.

Jason Williams

Answer 11

I spent a few days researching tools to generate C# documentation and I found Doxygen to be my favorite. I also wrote a post about this on my blog.

Answer 12

You could try the Live Documenter.

Lets you read the comments while your developing the software, rather than having to produce static content all the time.