Professional Visual Studio® 2008

9.4. Sandcastle Documentation Generation Tools

Sandcastle is a set of tools published by Microsoft that act as documentation compilers. These tools can be used to easily create very professional-looking external documentation in Microsoft-compiled HTML help (.CHM) or Microsoft Help 2 (.HxS) format. At the time of writing, Sandcastle was still beta software and had been released only as a Community Technology Preview (CTP).

NDoc, an open source project, is another well-known documentation generator. Although NDoc was widely used, it never gained much financial or contributor support as an open source project. In June 2006, the creator of NDoc, Kevin Downs, announced he was discontinuing work on the project.

The primary location for information on Sandcastle is the Sandcastle blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/sandcastle/. There is also a project on CodePlex, Microsoft's open-source project hosting site, at www.codeplex.com/Sandcastle/. You can find a discussion forum and a link to download the latest Sandcastle installer package on this site.

By default, Sandcastle installs to c:\Program Files\Sandcastle. When it is run, Sandcastle creates a large number of working files and the final output file under this directory. Unfortunately all files and folders under Program Files require administrator permissions to write to, which can be problematic particularly if you are running on Windows Vista with UAC enabled. Therefore it is recommended that you install it to a location where your user ...