Sandcastle update
Sandcastle, Microsoft's solution to generate documentation using XML tags in your source code, is getting more and more momentum in the .Net community. I have been using it since the first CTP became available and so far I have been very happy with the results. Anand Raman, Microsoft's Group manager for Sandcastle, is actively looking at forums and provides constant feedback to questions. In this post, I will try to give you a small update about the current status of Sandcastle.
Sandcastle releases
September CTP
The September CTP has been released. It contains a number of bugfixes. A full list of fixes can be found here on the Sandcastle blog. One of the new features is a new set of transforms. These transforms will produce documentation with the look and feel of Visual Studio 2005. You can download the new CTP here.
RTW 1.0
The first RTW release is planned for October. And as the next CTP is planned for this week, I expect the RTW release to take place near the end of October. Again, it's not clear yet what will be in this release, but Microsoft promised to support a number of NDoc-Only tags. There was also talk of a GUI and VS add-in, but it has been quiet on that front since it was mentioned at the release of the July CTP. However, I haven't been let down on features and fixes by the Sandcastle team to this point, so I expect that this will still be the case.
Sandcastle Help File Builder
There are a lot of community tools available to help you use Sandcastle. I've tried several of them, and some weeks ago I decided to stick to the Sandcastle Help File Builder, created by Eric Woodruff. At least, until a better option becomes available.
This GUI application provides an NDoc like GUI for Sandcastle. if you're used to working with NDoc, this tool is just great. Everything looks and feels the same. Just like NDoc, the latest version of this tool allows you to create a documentation project by importing a Visual Studio solution.
If you have an NDoc project for your documentation, the tool is able to import that too. So switching to this application to generate your documentation is really easy.
This tool also allows you to add references to GAC assemblies. Sandcastle requires all references to be available. This includes GAC assemblies that are referenced by assemblies you reference. A lot of the times you don't add these references to your projects. Using this tool, you specify these GAC assemblies as references to the documentation project.