Authoring/Integrating API Help for VS2008 and VS2010

  From time to time I have had to develop API's that are used by other developers inside and outside of my organization.  It has always been my thought to be able to package it up with nice documentation and professional looking help files.  Through some freely available tools, it is fairly easy to generate professional looking help files, but I always seemed to get stuck on integrating it with the VS IDE.  In this article I will show how I solved the problem for both VS2008 and the new Help3.x format for VS2010.

The tools you will need

GhostDoc  
Sandcastle
Sandcastle GUI
MSHC Migrate Utility
Visual Studio SDK (VS2010)
Visual Studio SDK (VS2008)
And, of course, you will need either or both of Visual Studio 2008/2010.

Sample API

public class API
{

public API()
{
}

public string Foo( string s )
{

return "Foo got " + s;

}

}

GhostDoc

The GhostDoc project is a free VS plug-in that greatly simplifies generating the XMLDoc Comments in your API source code.  As you define and implement your classes it is pretty trivial to create these comments within VS by simply typing three '/'s, giving you

Read more: Codeproject

Posted via email from jasper22's posterous