Is it possible to use SandCastle with Visual Studio 2008 and C++ (non-CLI)?

Question

I'm mystified: I'm using Visual Studio 2008 with C++ (non-CLI), and I can't for the life of me work out how to build the help file with Sandcastle.

Once its installed, and its generating an .xml file, shouldn't there be a menu option somewhere to switch on the build of the docs? Or at least a menu option to trigger the build of the docs?

Answer 1

I don't believe sandcastle works with doxygen.

Sandcastle actually has nothing to do with managed or unmanaged projects. Sandcastle works against a set of XML documents that are typically generated during the build process. If you manually built the xml, you could make it generate docs for Smalltalk.

That said, while its most common usage is in the managed world, it is certainly supported for native C++ as well. The key is that the visual studio supports pulling xml documentation out of C++ compiled without the /clr switch, and those same XML files can be provided to Sandcastle for your document generation.