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Documenting your API's

While looking at creating better API documentation for work projects it's occured to me that this space is very much in a bit of chaos at the moment. NDoc was asleep through .NET 2.0 and the lack of generics support is upsetting a lot of folk. The project is alive but like a lot of OSS projects, it's main man has a life and it comes first.

I do note with interest that Microsoft are planning to release their internal documentation tools to the masses, this forum says that this should have happend in June (with RTM in August) and it's now mid July....

While the doc generators sort them self's out I did manage to find this very nice VS add-in that combines the DXCore (CodeRush) plug-in framework with Lutz's old documenter source. It not only adds a nice little preview window but also a context menu to help add further doc xml elements, very sweet.

Update: How could I forget GhostDoc too, does a much better job than the C# /// way.

Comments

Leslie said:

No what you mean. Take a look at doxygen http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/

If you point it at your source code it produces great documentaion. It also has some other rich features and custom tags

# July 14, 2006 8:15 AM

Andrew Stopford's Weblog said:

After my post on documentation tools and the news that MS had a NDoc style tool up it's sleeve comes

# July 20, 2006 6:54 AM

Brandon said:

I don't think there's any documentation tool that can generate output which is 'usable'. We utilize technical writers to take care of the entire gamut of API documentation. The work is accomplished partly manual and partly automatic through easily available documentation tools. Our API documents are really 'usable' now and a real asset.

# February 7, 2008 1:59 AM

Roxane Gabriel said:

I am a previous developer, now tech writer who uses Innovasys HelpStudio and Document! X and find it's part automated, part manual process very developer oriented and easy to use. The tools including Document! X and HelpStudio really do everything you need to pull in your API and create rich text and VS context sensitive help files.

# March 18, 2008 11:18 AM
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