Visual Studio Hacks

Integrate Your Own Documentation into Visual Studio #72

Chapter 8, Comments and Documentation

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HACK

the Visual Studio .NET Integration Kit, and a freely available tool, you can

quickly and somewhat easily integrate your documentation directly into

Visual Studio.

The first step is to download the Visual Studio .NET Integration Kit. NDoc

will use this kit to create your documentation in the HTML Help 2 format,

the format used by Visual Studio. The Visual Studio .NET Integration Kit

can be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/

library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/hwmscextendingnethelp.asp.

Create Documentation with NDoc

To integrate help documentation into Visual Studio, you have to generate

your documentation a little bit differently. Instead of creating your docu-

mentation using the MSDN documentation type

[Hack #71], you will need to

create VS.NET 2003-type documentation. This is done by simply selecting

VS.NET 2003 from NDoc’s list of documentation types. (This documenta-

tion type is new to NDoc 1.3, so make sure you have the latest copy of

NDoc.)

You will also need to make a couple configuration changes. Under the

HTML Help 2.0 Deployment section, make sure that GenerateCollection-

File is set to true—you will also need to specify a CollectionNamespace. The

CollectionNamespace should be a unique value similar to your project’s

namespace. (Don’t use a URI, spaces, or special ...