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Documentation Tools

Because of the versatility of the XML output, many developers in the Open Source community began to see the usefulness of a project that could centralize a collection of programs to transform C# XML documentation to other more distributable documentation formats (see Figure 5-2 on p. 140).

Each of the following documentation tools has a unique advantage. The most advanced tool is NDoc. NDoc can convert the C# XML documentation to more output types than any other tool, so I will save the discussion of NDoc for last. Some of these tools work on multiple CLI implementations and therefore on multiple operating systems. Other tools support unique documentation output formats that you may desire.

NOTE

Most IDEs like Visual Studio.NET and #Develop have document generation tools as well that can be found under their Tools menu dropdown.

MonoDoc

MonoDoc (http://www.go-mono.com) can create HTML pages (Figure 5-3) and has a GUI (Figure 5-4 on p. 142) to read from the C# XML file.

Portable.NET csDoc

csDoc (http://www.southern-storm.com.au) can transform the C# XML output to two output targets: HTML and TexInfo. CsDoc2HTML outputs standard W3C HTML. TexInfo, (http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/) the GNU standard for project documentation, is created by the csDoc2Texi utility.

NetDoc

NetDoc (http://www.sydlow.com/) is a freely available tool from SYDLOW, LLC that can format the C# XML file to Portable Document Format (PDF).

Documentor for .NET

Although not a tool for converting C# XML documentation files, Lutz Roeder's Documentor for .NET (http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/) can be helpful in creating the comments. The tool, shown in Figure 5-5, shows HTML output in real time, along with syntax and format validation.