What documentation to use for VB.NET 4.0

Question

I'm looking for a tool that generates documentation from source tags in VB.NET 4.0 code.

Some of the problems I have encountered so far:

• doxygen does not support VB.NET
• NDOC and others are deprecated, or do not handle generics, etc.
• Sandcastle is complicated
• doc-o-matic and ForgeDoc are commercial and seem to focus on Visual Studio integration, which I don't use (intentionally)

The features I would appreciate:

• command line tool for a linked HTML generation
• graphical class structure

I hope someone can kindly point me to this little tool I overlooked... :)

Answer 1

Look at this link:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/36071/what-javadoc-equivalents-do-you-use-in-net

Sandcastle supported by Sandcastle Help File Builder - both found on Microsoft's CodePlex site.

A while back I was tasked with replacing our company's previous build-time documentation generation using NDoc (now deceased). Sandcastle was the proposed new method. After researching it, I found that Sandcastle is a mess of utilities produced by Microsoft to generate documentation. Trying to implement those utilities on their own is a nightmare.

Sandcastle Help File Builder is an incredibly useful layer that uses the Sandcastle utilities but makes the creation of a documentation project a million times easier. The developer behind it has been very responsive in the CodePlex forums when I've requested help.

It provides a GUI for configuring your project and produces a project file that is compatible with MSBuild. I set ours up to generate the SHFB project on the fly, run it with MSBuild, and output to our internal API web server. Works great.