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NDoc, VS2005 & Sandcastle (updated)

We're in the process of moving to Visual Studio Team System and porting our various unit testing, automated builds etc and one of the tools I'm surprised is missing from VSTS is an NDoc replacement.

I'm all for open source/third party tools and MSFT has done such a thorough job on the unit testing side I thought they might have done something in the code documentation area too (in all probability they spent too much time on the testing stuff and didn't have any left).

Anyway, I started to research NDoc and VSTS and found that the project seems to have stalled and there wasn't an official version with 2005 support (Generics) - a private beta is floating about though apparently. After catching a thread on a discussion forum I picked up on this post about "Sandcastle" - the code name for the MSFT internal documentation tool. Expect a release sometime this year then ;-)

In the meantime there is a interim version of NDoc that does support 2005 and you can find it here. I downloaded and compiled the source and it works perfectly - there may be an issue with the binaries release and a missing stylesheet so best to just get source and recompile.

More on Sandcastle here

Update 27 July '06
(via Larkware 935) "NDoc2.0 is dead" - the main developer on NDoc, Kevin Downs has pulled out of the project - read this for the issues and reasoning behind this. I fully understand and respect Kevins decision on this one.

Also the NDoc 2005 version mentioned above does run but seems to crash a lot...not investigated why yet though - I'll update again if I find anything worth mentioning.

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