Sandcastle VS DocFX

Sandcastle Helper File Builder has been around forever and started as an internal MS project IIRC, but for some reason few libraries use it.

https://github.com/EWSoftware/SHFB

An easy to use documentation tool is Sandcastle Help File Builder. Sandcastle can be used as a standalone tool or integrated directly into Visual Studio. After a new language extension is written and tested use Sandcastle to create a help file. The learning curve is short and is unforgiving in that it will report when elements of documentation is missing beginning at class level down to method descriptions and parameter information.

And if you want a standalone help file, you can use Sandcastle Help File Builder in combination with Sandcastle).

Sandcastle Helpfile Builder

1) Make that a habit for all your code. 2) Check the "Create XML documentation" option in your project's build options, 3) Use a tool like Sandcastle Helpfile Builder to automatically create documentation for your projects from these XML and your assemblies. 4) Profit!

XmlDoc comments are the standard way to document C#. In your project settings you'll find an option to generate a documentation file. This option causes the compiler to join all the comments together into a single xml file. You'll want to include that file in your nuget packages because it'll be used to power IDE intellisense when someone installs the package. There are a variety of tools out there that will generate documentation websites from the xmldoc comments. It's been a few years since I used it but Sandcastle Help File Builder used to be my go-to. You can set up your CI pipeline to build and publish the documentation site just like it publishes the nuget package.

Documentation comments also usually hook into documentation generator tools, like DocFX or Sandcastle, which can automatically generate HTML documentation web pages from your documentation comments.

This is a better looking version of what Java and C# have had for a long time (kudos to the author for that!), is that the inspiration for this tool?

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/window...

https://dotnet.github.io/docfx/

I saw the author mentioned in another comment that they found themselves peeping inside type declaration files "too often". While I do often use sites generated by the above tools to discover new API's that suit my needs, diving into the actual code using a good decompiler is still my first move, as it is often cheaper than seeking out the documentation online, and it will show me the actual implementation as well. So in my opinion there is no shame in looking inside the declaration files!

Tools like DocFx provide the ability to display the programmable functions in HTML pages. They are used with the following commands in the docfx folder:

AFAIK they use https://github.com/dotnet/docfx which can be too heavy for your case. We use mdBook for internal documentation (plain .md with mermaid plugin) and then serve it at docs.yourdevenv.com.

DocFX is a nice solution.

It uses DocFX

Some of the standard and well-maintained Tools for Comments are JSDoc for Javascript, DocFx for .NET, and JavaDoc for Java.

Actually, we use it for OptiTune, it's called "docfx" https://dotnet.github.io/docfx/

We would really prefer to use a somewhat generic pre-made tool for this (such as DocFX) compared to rolling our own solution. We can roll our own solution... But would prefer not to so that we can minimize development and maintenance overhead.