Generating documentation in Visual Studio 2008

Question

I have a group of methods which I have applied the summary tag like so :

/// <summary>
/// Returns Foo
/// </summary>
/// <param name="fooID">the fooID</param>
/// <returns>foo</returns>

Was wondering if there is a tool in visual studio 2008 to generate a document out of these summaries.

Answer 1

Look up Sandcastle. Here's a good article.

Download it here.

Answer 2

In addition to plain Sandcastle there is an interesting way to generate documentation with every build from within Visual Studio using SandCastle called DocProject. It installs project templates into VS2005/VS2008 and you can manage and build your documentation from right within Visual Studio.

You might also check out the Sandcastle Help File Builder GUI. This gets you around the awful limitations of trying to use Sandcastle from the command-line

Answer 3

I'll second the recommendation to use Sandcastle Help File Builder (SHFB). Sandcastle itself is a mess of utilities that have to be used in conjunction with each other in order to create the documentation. Very confusing if you try to make it all work together yourself.

SHFB makes using Sandcastle a heck of a lot easier. It produces a SHFB project file that can be built with MSBuild. I just finished implementing documentation generation into our build system using SHFB. It worked really well, the documentation for it is great, and the project coordinator is very responsive.