Sandcastle Help File Builder (SHFB) provides a standalone graphical application, Visual Studio integration package, and MSBuild tasks to generate help files from XML documentation comments. Sandcastle originated in a Microsoft project, but ongoing development is now overseen by Eric Woodruff.
It's no secret that I believe documentation is a crucial element of quality software - and not just because I've spent most of the last 25 years working on end-user and developer documentation. We've all written code that works perfectly fine for us, because we wrote it, but other users need help knowing what it does and how to put it to work. Hey, I bet you've even written code that, six months later, you forgot how it works. And now you'll spend the better part of a day relearning the code you wrote in the first place. It happens all the time and I've seen it over and over. Creating even the most simple documentation - notes in work tickets, comments in code, a README file - helps us remember what we created, how it works, and why we coded it that way months later after we've written thousands of lines of completely unrelated code.
Or when the colleague who wrote that code leaves the team and now you're responsible for maintaining it. Or someone wants to use the code from your repository and keeps submitting issues asking questions about it. The answer is to create some documentation for your code, preferably good, comprehensive documentation. Here are some tools and advice to help you get the job done.
![Generate Generate](http://www.helixoft.com/files/vsdocman/vsdocman_screenshot.png)
README First If you do nothing else, at least create a README file that provides basic information about your code or project, how to build or invoke it (if executable), and license or copyright details. GitHub can create a README.md file automatically for a new repository and displays it by default, with formatting, in your repo page, so there's little excuse to skip this simple step. What should be in your README beyond the basics? Jesse Luoto has written a simple yet incredibly handy page, as a README.md file, with a default README outline that you can clone directly into any new project, and it's all provided as 'free and unencumbered software released into the public domain'. Need some more ideas for an even better README? Stephen Whitmore created.
While written primarily for authors of Node.js modules, the advice offered is applicable to any software project written in any programming language (and there are translated versions of Whitmore's advice in Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish.) From an outline of recommended document formatting to advice on writing and links to good examples of READMEs, I highly recommend taking a look at Art of README and incorporating it into your own projects. You'll find a slightly different, but very interesting approach, in Besir Kurtulmus' article over at Algorithmia. Kurtulmus surveyed the README files from 1,000 GitHub repositories for each of 10 different programming languages and ran them through a machine learning algorithm to evaluate what makes a good README. Want to see how yours stacks up?
You can run any repo through the. XML Code Documentation For.NET Framework development, particularly in C#, are the officially sanctioned way to document your code with the ability to automatically create documentation files from these comments at compile time.
You could create XML documentation comments manually, but you don't have to. Is one of the tools available to parse your code as you write it and automatically create relevant XML comments. It even revises comments on-demand after you make changes to your code. Atomineer also supports Doxygen, Qt and JavaDoc code documentation formats, which I'll get to in a minute.
Provides a standalone graphical application, Visual Studio integration package, and MSBuild tasks to generate help files from XML documentation comments. Sandcastle originated in a Microsoft project, but ongoing development is now overseen by Eric Woodruff.
This is a free, Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) with really excellent documentation to get you started building your own docs. Click on image for larger view. Figure 1: Sandcastle Help File Builder Builds Highly Configurable Help From Your XML Comments is an older tool for generating class library documentation from your code assemblies and XML comments.
This project hasn't been updated in quite a while. Development continued in a successor project, but that doesn't seem to have been updated since 2013. These projects did, however, provide the basis of some other, newer tools, so I'm including them here for reference purposes.
Is a.NET Framework XML code documentation landscape that is meant to be very simple, producing only static HTML content from your code, making it very easy to host or distribute. Is a similar documentation generator, providing a very simple engine to read your assemblies and XML documentation to create help files.
The key with AutoHelp is the output, which uses ASP.NET MVC 5, ASP.NET WebApi, TypeScript, JQuery and Bootstrap to build your documentation as an attractive, modern web site. Click on image for larger view. Figure 2: AutoHelp Builds Your Code Documentation As A Modern ASP.NET MVC Web Application is a commercial tool that integrates with Visual Studio to provide automated XML comment creation and editing, help file generation, and even class diagram generation. VSdocman supports Visual Studio 2005 through 2015 and there are generator versions for C#, Visual Basic.NET, and Visual Basic 6. There's a 14-day trial and licenses for individuals or teams.
SubMain's is another commercial tool to help you create and edit XML comments and generate help from your comments and code. In addition to the usual features, GhostDoc Pro and Enterprise include configurable document templates, a code spelling checker, Documentation themes, previews, and more. There is a free version of GhostDoc along with single-purchase licenses and yearly subscriptions for Pro and Enterprise features. Oleg Shilo's does something really simple, giving you a quick preview of a single XML code comment block within Visual Studio. No need to compile your code, just preview and make any necessary edits right there.
Click on image for larger view. Figure 3: DocPreview Renders a Single XML Comment Block Within Visual Studio A similar tool from Travis Illig, is a plug-in for rendering XML comment previews within Visual Studio. More Code Documentation Tools There are some other established formats for code documentation, and toolsets that can generate help files from those formats as well as XML comments. Here's a quick overview of those tools.
Picked up where the NDoc projects left off, and has developed into a highly configurable, flexible code documentation tool for a variety of languages including C/C, Objective-C, C#, PHP, Java, Python, and others. While primarily developed for Linux and Mac OS X, there are binaries for Windows and the entire project is open sourced under the GNU General Public license. There's extensive documentation for the project., by Oleksandr Manenko, is a simple helper extension for Doxygen that highlights code comments for editing. Oracle's comment formatting and toolset is a standard for Java development (no surprise there), and is also the primary code documentation format for some API documentation toolsets. Finally, QDoc is a comment format and toolset originally designed for the Qt embedded device development framework.
I don't think it's widely used outside of the Qt community, though it's worth knowing about if you do embedded or mobile device programming. To learn more, see on the Qt site. Useful Code Documentation Extensions Here are a few more tool and extensions that will help you with various code documentation tasks.
Contents. General information Basic general information about the generators, including: creator or company, license, and price. Name Creator First public release date Latest stable version 2005/09/19 DMD 2.078.3 Boost Innovasys 1998 2014.1 Proprietary 1997/10/26 1.8.14 GPL Edward Loper 2002/01/— 3.0 (Free Pascal Documentation Generator) Sebastian Guenther 2005? 2.6.4 GPL Simon Marlow 2002 2.13.1 (2012) BSD 2000/09/— 8.9.28 Imagix Corp. 1995 7.3 Proprietary 1995 1.6 GPL Michael Mathews 2001/07/— 1.10.2 GPL Michael Mathews 2007?. ^ GNU D Compiler. ^ Though not supported as a native input language, Doxygen can be extended through the use of filters.
Examples include Visual Basic, VB.NET, Perl, and Pascal. Doxygen has limited native support for Python. It can be extended through the use of the doxypypy input filter. Generators listed here can be extended to support any language that has comments. ^ Ddoc has a macro system which can be customized to output any desired format. CHM, groff (manpages), XHTML, XML, and LaTeX (so PostScript and PDF) were tested. They are not currently included in the standard distribution.
Standard HTML output also is generated using macros and can be redefined. ^ Generated from the LaTeX output only. ^ Though not officially supported as an output format, Epydoc uses LaTeX and PostScript as intermediate steps to produce the final PDF documentation.
^ Via from Third Parties. ^ RDoc currently only provides generators for CHM and XML documents in the RDoc version provided as part of the Ruby 1.9 Core. RDoc generates documentation for, which is Ruby's version of the Unix man pages. Generated from the LaTeX output only References.