developer manuals

Question

My team and I are in the final phase of our software development project. We are using Visual Studio to compile our project and coding in C#. We need to build user manuals. Is there any way to generate user manuals from the comments of the application and code?

Answer 1

Assuming you have commented your code appropriately there are a number of third-party tools that you can use to generate documentation.

The following list is not exhaustive:

• SandCastle
• NDoc
• Doc-O-Matic
• VSdocman
• Doxygen
• ...

I just hope your end-users are developers and you are writing some sort of API. These sort of documentation generation tool are usually only suited for internal use or external developers for which you created an API that they can use.

Answer 2

If your target audience was other developers, you could do something like what is mentioned in this SO post but if it is end users who aren't developers, then it isn't likely that the comments in your code are going to be all that useful to them, and if they are... then they probably aren't all that useful to the developer.

Answer 3

If you were using XML Documentation Commments...you could use the /doc compile option.

XML Documentation Comments

When you compile with the /doc option, the compiler will search for all XML tags in the source code and create an XML documentation file. To create the final documentation based on the compiler-generated file, you can create a custom tool or use a tool such as DocFX or Sandcastle.