How to build help documentation using Sandcastle – XML comments

After building XML Comments / Documentation and viewing these in a browser it may be useful to create documentation. Microsoft no longer develop a tool, but a tool Sandcastle they initially developed has continued.

This is some of my experience:

In addition to the normal Sandcastle, I installed the Sandcastle Visual Studio integration package.

Sandcastle have large documentation, but I found the basic steps were:

1. Open Visual Studio
2. Add New Project > Documentation > Sandcastle Help File Builder Project
3. Add Documentation Sources – Reference to the project you want to document
4. Build the project
5. To view your new help file
   1. Use Menu > View > View Help File
   2. Or Open the Folder Location and open the Help folder
6. Find the file ContentLayout.content
   1. Change the title from [TODO]
7. You may get a lot of warnings and lots of ‘Red’ ‘missing documentation’
   1. To suppress these use Properties > Missing Tags and uncheck warning
   2. Or to use it to find missing documentation, uncheck
8. All seems good so far.

See also

Sandcastle

XML Documentation

MSDN