Sandcastle VS MkDocs

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.

The original mkdocs uses a Python package for its installer, so you can just pip install mkdocs, mkdocs new ., and then mkdocs build to convert markdown files into HTML.

If you don't like to run javascript outside of a browser, MkDocs is a great Python-based alternative: https://www.mkdocs.org/

I like Markdown because it's simple and doesn't give me that many headaches.

You know what I don't like? HTML, for user submitted content in particular. The mess I've seen, after someone opted for using HTML for messages in a system, because that's what JS based editors were available for at the time. Endless need to work against XSS, with more and more incremental updates needed to the sanitization logic, some of which broke the presentation of the data in the DB.

Never again. Markdown, BBCode, anything but that.

As for docs? Currently just some Markdown, because that's what GitHub, GitLab, Gitea and others all know how to render.

Maybe something like https://www.mkdocs.org/ for the more standalone use cases.

Developing the documentation website using an open-source static site generator like Sphinx or MkDocs to build the files locally through the command line, rather than using a commercial program.

MkDocs is BSD-2-Clause licensed and has a vibrant community; GitHub Discussion is used for questions and high-level discussion, while the Gitter/Matrix chat room is used to discuss less complex topics. These communities provide essential resources and support.

MkDocs is a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that’s geared towards building project documentation. Documentation source files are written in Markdown, and configured with a single YAML configuration file.

MkDocs is a popular static site generator designed explicitly for building project documentation. Its minimalist approach, flexibility, and ease of use have made it a favorite among developers and ideal for non-technical users.