Visual Studio (2008) doesn't generate documentation xml

Question

I have a C# dll project in Visual Studio 2008. In the project property pages, on the Build tab, the checkbox 'XML Documentation File' is checked. The path is 'bin\Debug\Fusion.BusinessObjects.XML' However, when building the solution, no xml files is created.

I have referenced this dll in a number of other projects, and one had a copy of the XML documentation file. This however only contained:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<doc>
    <assembly>
        <name>Fusion.BusinessObjects</name>
    </assembly>
    <members>
    </members>
</doc>

Why is the documentation file not generated? Needles to say, the code is documentented with comments like

/// <summary>
/// Helper class to construct a EntityCollection
/// </summary>

Answer 1

Are you sure you set that checkbox for Debug builds? By default it's only generated on Release builds. You might want to try a Release build and see if one is generated.

Answer 2

The "XML documentation file" setting can have different values for different build configurations (debug/release). Is it possible that you've set it for debug (for example) but are doing a release build (or vice-versa)..?

Answer 3

It happened to me sometime ago and the way I corrected the problem was by recreating the project file from scratch and starting with a clean folder structure.