Is there a .NET library or tool available for interacting with DITA content?

Question

We are integrating documentation authored according to DITA. The DITA Open Toolkit processes all files using java whereas we are looking for a solution that allows us to work with the DITA content on the fly from a C#-based application.

Does anyone know of any .NET projects that are written to work with DITA maps and content?

Answer 1

I don't believe there are any Microsoft-made DITA libraries available for .NET.

There was a paper written for SIGDOC 2008 called "Pragmatic DITA on a budget" that refers to generating DITA content from commented C# code. A PDF is available here. This probably isn't quite what you're looking for, but it could be useful... It might be worth getting in touch with the author about this project.

Answer 2

It's not the cleanest solution in the world, but you could call the DITA Open Toolkit command line tools through Process. If you do it right, you can suppress the console window and the user won't know the difference.

Answer 3

You could use a tool like IKVM to turn the java toolkit jars into .net assemblies and then use the toolkit from there.