Visual Studio 2012 XML Comments not being built

Question

I've been working on a C# project using Visual Studio 2012 and have been looking into generating documentation. All is going well for the most part, but for some reason, some of the files in the project are not being included in the resulting .xml documentation file. Looking at two files in the same namespace, and otherwise completely similar, one was being documented and the other wasn't.

One class:

namespace testingGui.Utilities
{
    /// <summary>
    /// AmazonApi summary
    /// </summary>
    public class AmazonApiCalls
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Constructor for the Amazon class
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="name">User name</param>
        /// <param name="pass">Password</param>
        public AmazonApiCalls(string name, string pass)
        {
            //code
        }
//etc.

And the other class:

namespace testingGui.Utilities
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Azure_Api summary
    /// </summary>
    static class Azure_API
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Azure_Api's authentication function
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="username">username</param>
        /// <param name="password">password</param>
        public static string authenticateSession(string username, string password)
        {
//etc.

(The project involves using various cloud service providers, and the specific functions for these two providers go in the corresponding classes).

They both have xml documentation comments for all of the functions, but after a build, the Amazon class gets documented and the Azure class does not. Both files are included in the project and are in the same directory, namespace, etc. These are just examples, as there are many files that are being included and many that are not.

The only reason I can think of is that the Azure file (and the others) might have been created outside of the project and then imported (I wasn't involved in that part so I'm not sure), but I don't see why that would be the problem since they are included in the project. I've looked through the msdn documentation and searched on Google, but I can't find any other cases of this happening or what to do if it happens.

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Although I did not find anything about it in the MSDN, it would make sense to generate the documentation for all publicly visible (that means public and protected) elements. Your class that has documentation generated is public, while the class you are having problems with is internal, as this is the default modifier for classes if you don't specify one.