Thursday, February 07, 2008
DocProject: .NET Code Documentation Made Easier...
Posted on Thursday, February 07, 2008 10:16:30 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  Comments [1] | 
Categories: .NET | Fundamentals | Utilities

If you are a .NET developer I recommend checking out DocProject. It's an open source front end for the SandCastle documentation engine. Sandcastle picks up where NDoc left off, and is a Microsoft open source project that provides services for creating MSDN style HTML and compiled help. Unfortunately it's a bit of a bear to work with (lots of Xml configuration files, batch files etc).

This is where DocProject comes in. The basic process is to add a "DocProject" or "DocSite" to your solution, and then add references to all the other sites/assemblies in the solution into the DocProject. Then during a build, DocProject actually runs Sandcastle to create the doc.

I've only just played with it a little, and it's pretty easy to get setup and running, but the actual compilation of the help was pretty slow. It was running for >15  minutes on my Core 2 Duo notebook! After digging around a little, it seemed the issue was that I have some ArcGIS Server WebService proxies in one of the assemblies, and it was cranking out all the help doc for that - which is substantially larger than the actual code I was trying to document. Once done, the output is pretty good.

docproject-example

Combine this with GhostDoc, and there is no excuse for not having good developer API documentation for whatever you write.

Check it out at www.codeplex.com/docproject

Saturday, February 09, 2008 11:17:16 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)
Thanks for the post Dave. FYI, I just released DocProject 1.10.0 and one of the new features is much improved performance, so hopefully it will be much faster now on your Core 2 Duo :)
Dave Sexton
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