SandCastle

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SandCastle

Developer:	Microsoft Corporation
Latest release:	March 2007 CTP / March 16, 2007
OS:	Windows
Use:	Documentation generator
Website:	www.microsoft.com

SandCastle produces MSDN style documentation out of reflection information of .NET assemblies and XML documentation comments found in the sourcecode of these assemblies.

1 Overview
2 Using SandCastle
3 History
4 See also
5 External links
6 References

[edit] Overview

The SandCastle application was developed by Microsoft to create a scalable and performing Documentation generator for their API Documentation. The latest CTP release of the software already does in 30 minutes what took the old tool 10 hours. There is currently not much documentation on the application since it is still early in the development stage. It is known however that the application will become part of the Visual Studio SDK.

The application currently does not feature a Graphical User Interface, only 3 command line tools (MrefBuilder, XslTransform and BuildAssembler). MrefBuilder uses CCI to reflect against the assemblies and generate an output file, XslTransform transforms the output file to an XML file which is used as an input to BuildAssembler. This then creates the files that can work as an input to the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop compiler (HHC).

[edit] Using SandCastle

Because in its current state SandCastle by itself is rather complex to use, people have come up with tools and scripts that can automate the task for them. This section contains a list of such tools and scripts.

[edit] History

November 11, 2006 the November 2006 CTP version was released, along with bug fixes other items being supported are a few nDoc tags, and also transforms support Firefox.

October 1, 2006 the September 2006 CTP version was released, bug fixes primarily seem to focus on fixing bugs in the output, and adding better support for some XML comment tags.

August 28, 2006 the August 2006 CTP version was released, the bugs fixed in this release seem to primarily for fixing crashes of the application. HTML output of the application is now compatible with Firefox. Some changes were made to the cmd line interface.

July 29, 2006 the July 2006 CTP version was released, this version mainly focussed on performance and scalability. No GUI was present yet, the application did not contain a feature to resolve GAC DLLs yet.