I’ve always used nDoc for building code documentation, and then (around 2 years ago) I shifted to Sandcastle Help File Builder. We’re wanting to start documenting code at work, so today I downloaded the latest version (along with Sandcastle to give the latest versions a whirl.
I was presently surprised. The previous version of SHFB was just an nDoc clone, but now it’s moved on a lot. It’s got a whole pile of nice features now, including caching of all the stuff that used to make a build really slow; HTMLHelp 2; and more.
The best addition though is the support for static content. I actually couldn’t figure out how to do it at first - in nDoc there used to be an AdditionalContent option (or something to that affect), and I knew the latest version of SHFB had support for this but I couldn’t find an option for it. Google returned pre-2006 results which were incorrect. It was staring me in the face all along though - the newest version works like a VS solution - all you need to do is add the files to your solution and they get automatically incorporated. Very nice.
Overall, I’m very impressed - it’s literally hundreds of times faster than the previous verison I used (if you enable the custom build components that come built-in) and it creates a far slicker output file.
Update: Error Using MSBuild
The latest version of SHFB no longer has a console application included - you need to use MSBuild instead. However, when trying to hook up my project to MSBuild as per the documentation, I kept getting the following error:
error MSB4057: The target "Build" does not exist in the project.
I think there’s a bug in SHFB where it isn’t building the project file correctly. Adding the following line at the bottom of my .shfbproj file sorted the issue out:
<Import Project="$(SHFBROOT)SandcastleHelpFileBuilder.targets" />
You can add this directly above the closing </Project> tag.