Make all that typing and tagging pay off with an open source documentation tool that creates help documents from your XML comments.
So you have a large number of XML comments peppered throughout your application. Now what can you do with them? While Visual Studio includes some tools to work with these comments, the real benefit comes from an open source tool called NDoc. NDoc is a tool that will take your XML comments and turn them into a number of different types of documentation, including help files or MSDN-style web documentation.
The first step to creating your documentation is to generate an XML file with all of your XML comments. To do this, follow the instructions in either [Hack #68] if you are using C# or [Hack #70] if you are using VB.NET.
Once you have the .xml file, you are ready to turn it into full documentation.
The next step is to download and install NDoc from http://ndoc.sourceforge.net. Once you have downloaded and installed NDoc, you will need to open the application, which is shown in Figure 8-4.
The next step is to create a new NDoc Project. This can be done one of two ways: you can create a new blank project and then manually select each of the assemblies that you want to document, or you can select New from Visual Studio Solution and select your solution, after which NDoc will load all of your assemblies.
After loading your assemblies, you can then configure how you want your documentation to be generated. There are way too many options to cover here, but suffice it to say you can configure just about any part of the documentation that you wish. The main choice is what type of documentation you want to generate. This is controlled by the Documentation Type drop-down. From this list you can choose any number of different types (for this example, I will leave the option set to the default, MSDN).
From this point, you simply need to click the Build button and NDoc will generate the documentation based on your XML comments. Figure 8-5 shows an example of the help file generated by NDoc.
NDoc also generates web documentation, which can be seen in Figure 8-6.
This tool is actually that simple. In just a couple clicks, you can go from your XML comments to high-quality documentation. NDoc is a complex application with a multitude of options and different formats; I encourage you to explore the tool and its options. The tool comes with good documentation (as it should!), and you can also find lots of information at the NDoc Wiki, located at http://ndoc.sourceforge.net/wiki.