MSDN style documentation

I've been an advocate of inline documentation for source code for many years. In a previous incarnation as Director Of Engineering at stingray, I hassled my poor teams relentlessly for good source documentation. I was very pleased indeed when I saw that C# provided built in XML documentation and quite liked code comment reports generated by the visual studio IDE.

For the last week or so, I have been involved in heavily documenting a project that has taken me almost a year to complete for a client in the UK. Although I had already used the bill in XML documentation for the C# based classes and have generated the code, and report pages on several occasions I found them lacking and to be honest, I think my client did too. After revisiting all the documentation and beginning to document several of the visual basic classes and examples in my project using the VBCommenter from the GotDotNet site. I discovered the absolutely superb nDoc project on the SourceForge site.

nDoc enables you to produce MSDN style documentation in the form of .CHM files and web sites that look absolutely fantastic and integrate with the standard MSDN help files for such information as inherited members and so on.

Someone asked me the other day if I would put help files on the site for xray-tools so as an experiment, and because I've had to make a change to the tool recently, I have read on the documentation for the RectTracker control and put it up on my site.