Generate documentation under .Net 2.0?

I really need to generate some documentation under .Net 2.0. I know that this issue has been raised in a previous post few month ago, but no explicit solution has been provided. Also the NDoc project seems dead (as suggest the broken wiki).

Does anyone has a practical (even minimal) solution to generate documentation for .Net 2.0

Thanks in advance,
Joannes

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Generate documentation under .Net 2.0?

Christopher Alden
Thanks chris,
was also talking to Tom Hollander who works in patterns and practices who I worked with on an early .Net project in Australia back in 2002. He's in redmond now and pointed me at the following which sort of explains all:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php thread_id=8415964&forum_id=38707

Cheers
Ross
benryves
Well, I just mailed the maintainer and will keep you posted on anything I hear.

By the way, MS didn't actually adopt NUnit as far as I know -- both with NUnit and NAnt (= MSBuild) they did look at these products but eventually rolled their own without reusing the source code. I gather it's a licensing issue... they don't want any part of Visual Studio connected to an open source license.

But I agree that it would be nice if they eventually cloned NDoc in the same way. It's pretty silly that MS no longer provides any way to produce documentation from XML comments.
Itzhak

Any update on progress of Ndoc towards support of v2.0 of .Net since the last posts above I noticed the wiki appears locked or something so not sure if this is indicative of a a hiatus or not. No v2.0 version just a dead wiki link to some notes on how to do it using the code...

This tool was such a useful addendum to v1.0 and v1.1 and have used it on all projects since early 2002. Seems a pity it will not be there for v2.0 and its absence leaves a big *** in C#/.Net auto documenting. As im currently working on a large SOA solution, possibly in 2.0, im interested in getting some top quality doco out for consumers.

Has MS ever thought of bringing it (or a version of it) inhouse as with nunit Would be very useful addition to the suite I thought....

Cheers
Ross Nelson

Sniperumm

I found this article (Japanese only)
http://blogs.wankuma.com/yaneurao/archive/2006/02/23/21472.aspx

and he said, just create NDocGui.exe.config file inside bin folder where NDocGui.exe is located.

< xml version="1.0"  > 
<configuration>
<startup>
    <supportedRuntime version="v2.0.50727" />
    <supportedRuntime version="v1.1.4322" />
    <requiredRuntime version="v1.1.4322" />
</startup>
</configuration>


Note:Make sure your project is generating xml file and installing HTML Help Workshop
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx familyid=00535334-c8a6-452f-9aa0-d597d16580cc&displaylang=en

HatePickingNames
Hi Joannes,

There is an option to create an XML file based on the comments entered. You probably can generate that and apply an XSL to that to get an HTML appearance to the XML.

Regards,
Vikram
CindyR

Joannes,

Thanks for you post. As I mentioned in the other thread our plans are to release documentation compilers for .Net 2.0 as a Community Technology Previews (CTP) version by the end of June 2006 and then RTM by the end of August 2006. I will have a detailed post about this before our CTP release next month. Cheers.

Anand..

Microsoft Corporation
JoLu
Thanks for the link, I wasn't aware that Kevin had started posted to the SourceForge mailing list again! Our beta mailing list was completely dead since early September.

Looks like he's already busy finishing up the project but doesn't have the RC/RTM so we'll probably have to wait until some time after VS2005 is publically available before NDoc 2.0 gets released.
David Gallivan
NDoc is in fact being updated and will fully support 2.0 including generics, but progress is slow due to real life issues on the part of the maintainer. I tested a few betas which already worked quite well but it's been a month since I've heard anything. When the RTM is out I'm going to mail him and ask what's happening.
Pavana
By the way, just in case you or other NDoc users were not aware of it, there is another way to create formatted HTML pages from XML comments: http://www.doc-o-matic.com/

Doc-o-matic is much more powerful than NDoc -- for example, it supports non-.NET languages and has a built-in editor and spell checker for the comment text -- but it costs a fair chunk ($500 for .NET). Might be worth it if you need nicely formatted .NET 2.0 documentation right now, or if you can use the extra features.

PS: Speaking of money, in the SF thread linked above Kevin complains about a lack of donations to the NDoc project... so if you like NDoc and want to encourage him to work faster, you should probably send a few bucks his way!
perfect13
Lets hope the ndoc team (read kevin) can get it up and working with 2005 in the short term. As a solutions architect I think that ndoc is indispensible for producting technical documentation across any layer in your development space, either interfaces or internal implementation. MS really needs to think about making it a standard add-on going forward, by whatever arrangement.
shade
It looks like a nice fellow has picked up NDoc and gotten it at least partially working on .NET 2.0 with Visual Studio 2005.
http://jonas.lagerblad.com/blog/ p=4
also
http://www.vehemence.org.uk/files/ndoc/ndoc-bin-1.3.1-v13.zip
TeamonD

Hi All,

If you haven't already seen this, here is the hyperlink to the latest NDoc05 Beta on sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php group_id=163095

Hope this helps,

Kind regards,

Frank M. Palinkas
MCP, MCT, MCSE, MCDBA, A+
Microsoft Registered Partner
Senior Technical Communicator & Web Accessibility Designer
phfjeld
For 2.0, I am using Doxygen. http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/

It generates html files from a subset of xml docs, will generate a chi help file if you want, pdf, rtf and latex documentation. Correctly configured, it will generate a uml class diagarm, a call graph for your methods, and inheritance hierarchies.

The program is open source and is used extensively in the linux community. It also correctly parses generics. It has some cool features such as automatically generating links from your comments by simply writing out the class name.

What it doesn't do is parse your assemblies, or link to sdk documentation. References are strictly limited to the list of source files you feed it.

I find Doxygen more than satisfactory for a stop-gap measure until NDoc is gold or MS releases something useful.
Felix Lo
Actually, I just did patch NDoc in order to skip any generic type. For an example of what I did get, look at the NSvm documentation.

Although, it does not seem too complicated to handle generic types (it's not that different from classical types). I hope that the NDoc team will do it soon.

Joannes
Generate documentation under .Net 2.0?

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