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Zohar Peled
Zohar Peled

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Is there an online documentation generator for c#?

I've been looking all over and all the documentation generators for c# I've found needs to be installed on the developer's computer - at least as a visual studio extension.

I can't install anything on my computer, and since it's for a side project I really wouldn't want to ask the IT department to install SandCastle (or DocFx or whatever) for me.

Isn't there a free only xml-to-html converter that can generate a half-decent html documentation from a project's xml documentation file?

Sure, it can be done using xslt and css, but I was kinda hoping there's already something out there, since it's been at least 15 years since I've last worked with xslt and probably 10 since I last wrote css...

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Shaun Lawrence

Docfx does not have to be installed on your machine. Assuming you have access to Visual Studio as you are writing C# then you could consume the docfx command line NuGet package.

nuget.org/packages/docfx.console

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Zohar Peled

Thanks, I'll check it out

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peledzohar profile image
Zohar Peled

Thank you! I've been looking into DocFx and it seems like this is something I can work with.

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Davyd McColl

I'm also interested to know. I'd even settle for a good standalone command line tool that uses the available xmldoc file.

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Al Gonzalez

I'm playing with Natural Docs now and it looks promising. However, it does require installation.

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Davyd McColl

It's a pity it doesn't seem to understand xmldocs. Xmldocs provide intellisense and I've already created xmldocs for a lot of my libraries because of that.

It's almost getting to the point where I need to just write my own generator ):

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Al Gonzalez

Yeah, I just run it against the C# projects with the '///' XML Documentation commented code.

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Davyd McColl

That is the xmldoc! Their documentation suggested I'd have to use another format. I'll check it out then. Thanks 🙂