SandCastle and DocProject

Having used SandCastle for generating all my code documentation for almost a year. I must say that it have done a great job for me (not sure for those consuming the documentation), as everything is automated using NAnt with CruiseControl.NET.

However, the initial setup is not easy, as there are a few things that need to be installed before it can work. Starting with the GUI will be the easiest but it cannot be automated. Therefore, the integrating of the generating of the documentation using NAnt is one of the option. CodeProject have any excellent article with a sample of a NAnt script for generating the help file. Be warned that the script is very long and might take a while to understand and know what changes are required for it to work in your environment.

Recently, due to too much parallel development work, this documentation have to be generated ASAP, so that my colleagues can consume them. Developing a project with distributed teams in different geographical location and time zone is a challenge and this document need to be shared in a more efficient way. So I was searching around and found DocProject which can publish the help file as a web application. Interestingly, I did not see much blog talking about the use of the DocProject, so decided to shared some opinions about it as I think it just great tool to have.

With the used of this tool, hopefully it will help to save my colleagues having to download a new version of the help file every time it is generated by SandCastle. To get the DocProject running is much easier than I thought as it integrated with the Visual Studio, except for a few more things to be installed. Of course the only setback I have now with this tools is that I need to integrate with CruiseControl.NET and using NAnt with msbuild task is sweet and easy except that I do not want to install VS on the CC server. Looking at the roadmap of DocProject, I do hope that this is part of the pirority.


Looking at the above image the whole NHibernate API is clearly visible. This is all done by creating a DocProject and include the NHibernate dll to the VS->tools->options->DocProject->External Sources. For those that are interested to provide some documentation to your code, I do urge you to look into the DocProject. Meanwhile, I will continue to try if I can setup the documentation generation with NAnt without the installation of VS but just the SDK.