Topic: c# documentation ndoc sandcastle

C# Documentation (It ain’t that hard)

Jason Pearl, Thursday, October 15, 2009 @ 12:14 pm

On a recent project after months and months and hundreds of files worth of work, we were asked to provide documentation for the code. This request could have gone one of two ways depending upon how well we adhered to some basic documentation rules.

The C# compiler itself is setup to extract documentation which can then be piped through one of a number of documentation generation apps. My preference is a new(ish) project called SandCastle from Microsoft, which aims to provide much of the featureset that NDoc once did. Unfortunately this application provides no GUI. A fine gentleman named Eric Woodruff stepped in to wrap this application in an easy to use GUI for us aptly named Sandcastle Help File Builder. Through the use of good comments written WHILE we wrote the code, we were able to pop out some documentation for every bit of code we wrote in a matter of minutes. Add to this the nice information we get when using our code via intellisense, and it simply doesn't make sense not to strictly enforce documentation standards on your project.

I often see code written with little or no attention paid to comments. Sometimes the comments are fairly haphazard and appear to follow no standards whatsoever. By following documentation standards, you too can auto generate documentation instead of wasting hours or days going back through and trying to remember what your code does. Continue reading »

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Software Development