| NDoc 2.0 AlphaNDoc is an extensible code documentation generation tool for .NET developers. The program was originally created by Don Kackman and Kevin Downs. Lately, Kevin has been the sole maintainer. You can find more details about the project on the official website. The associated SourceForge page hosts the last official releases, mailing lists, and discussion forums. The SituationSo what’s that got to do with me? Well, the problem is that NDoc was never officially updated for the .NET Framework 2.0. Alpha test versions have been released regularly to a private mailing list, but a final release version was never created due to the sheer complexity of the task, combined with a lack of financial support by the user community, and other unrelated issues intruding upon the development process. In June 2006 the matter was further complicated by Microsoft’s informal announcement of the “Sandcastle” documentation generator. A beta version is supposed to ship before the end of July, and coming from Microsoft this tool will likely become the de-facto standard for .NET documentation generation. Needless to say, this announcement greatly discouraged Kevin from putting any further effort into a final release of NDoc 2.0. However, “Sandcastle” is unlikely to support all those extra tags and features that NDoc users know and love, and while “Sandcastle” is pending release online forums are still flooded with requests for a .NET 2.0 documentation generator. Since the last NDoc alpha version that Kevin sent out to testers actually works quite nicely – and contains a truly stupendous amount of enhancements over the old 1.3.1 release – I’ve decided to offer this version as an “unofficial” download so that his hard work shall not disappear without a trace. Update 2006-08-12. The first Sandcastle CTP has been released, and in my opinion way before its time. Microsoft’s product still has significant drawbacks compared to NDoc – no support for custom tags, no linking to a local MSDN Library installation – and completely lacks any sort of integrated user interface, even from the command line. I recommend sticking with NDoc for the time being. Update 2007-08-19. Another year has gone by, Sandcastle has stabilized a bit more, and Eric Woodruff has created a nice NDoc-style GUI that can import NDoc control files. It’s still not possible to have a CHM file link to local MSDN Library content, but overall Sandcastle works well enough now to retire NDoc. Just in time, too, since NDoc recently started crashing on me with obscure COM errors – probably related to my Vista 64 upgrade. The DownloadThe most recent (fairly stable) alpha version of NDoc 2.0 is NDoc2-Alpha3u.zip (950 KB). This is a standard ZIP archive containing subdirectories and long file names. Just extract everything into a directory of your choice, then execute either The archive does not contain any other documentation. If you don’t know how NDoc works you’ll have to visit the official website and/or get an official release, and figure it out from there. Also, this download does not include any source code, and may not run on Mono. I don’t have the current source code and can’t help you obtain it – sorry.
Important: The new NDoc project file format is incompatible with NDoc 1.3.1, so you must use One BugfixBruno Braga informed me that Firefox would show empty pages when opening NDoc-generated HTML pages. He also found a very simple fix: in the JavaScript file ndoc.js (also generated by NDoc), move the statement Franz Alex Gaisie-Essilfie was kind enough to decompile NDoc using Reflector, apply this fix, and recompile the whole package into NDoc2-Alpha3u-fix.zip (732 KB). This download is smaller than the original package because it was compiled in release mode and lacks PDB files, which you shouldn’t need anyway. This page was last updated on 01 August 2009. Current version available at http://www.kynosarges.de |