Generate HTML / Help files from VS 2010 C# XML documentation

We are using Sandcastle for transformation & Sandcastle Help File Builder as a user interface to manage the help projects. In my opinion the beauty of the Sandcastle and SHFB is, that beside the "average" source code documentation, you can add additional information like architecture of the program, patterns that must be followed or any additional conceptional content for your project that is not tied directly to one class in your program. This can be done by creating additional xml files with the help of the Microsoft Authoring Schema (can be edited with visual studio as the xml file and the schema for it are available). Its pretty easy to start with those both tools to creating MSDN like documentation.

A long time ago I tried docbook which is nearly the same on the technical side (xml files containing the information and xslt files to transform it to various output types). But it was no option for us, because there is no transformation out there that can use the visual studio generated xml documentation (plus the transformation of conceptual content was pretty painful for us).

Two more free tools that allow creation of documentation from Xml comments:

• NDoc
• Sandcastle

Sandcastle + SHFB are a great combo. Free and generates html, chm, etc