Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 8, Comments and Documentation

#71 Create Documentation from XML Comments

HACK

As you can see, customizing this power toy is easy to do, and there are liter-

ally no boundaries to the customization that you can do considering that the

full source code is available.

HACK

#71

Create Documentation from XML Comments Hack #71

Make all that typing and tagging pay off with an open source documentation

tool that creates help documents from your XML comments.

So you have a large number of XML comments peppered throughout your

application. Now what can you do with them? While Visual Studio includes

some tools to work with these comments, the real benefit comes from an

open source tool called NDoc. NDoc is a tool that will take your XML com-

ments and turn them into a number of different types of documentation,

including help files or MSDN-style web documentation.

The first step to creating your documentation is to generate an XML file

with all of your XML comments. To do this, follow the instructions in either

“Master C# XML Comments”

[Hack #68] if you are using C# or “Create XML

Comments with VB.NET”

[Hack #70] if you are using VB.NET.

Once you have the .xml file, you are ready to turn it into full documentation.

Using NDoc

The next step is to download and install NDoc from http://ndoc.sourceforge.

net. Once you have downloaded and installed NDoc, you will need to open

the application, which is shown ...