Quick and Easy C# Project Documentation in Visual Studio

Visual Studio comes with a quick and easy "code documentation generator", however sometimes you might want to make the documentation look professional and presentable.

There is a few "ASP.NET code documentation generators" out there, but two of my favourites is NDoc and Sandcastle(Microsoft).

NDoc is a code documentation generator for the Common Language Infrastructure. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Sandcastle is a code documentation generator from Microsoft that automatically produces MSDN style reference documentation out of reflection information of the .NET assemblies and XML documentation comments found in the source code of these assemblies.

To quickly create XML documentation for your .NET classes during every build, open the project Properties, click the Build tab, scroll down to the Output section, and check the "XML Documentation File" property. Provide a file name to which Visual Studio should save the output, and then close the dialog. Visual Studio will update the documentation every time you build. All done with the click of a button, and also very handy when you need to document code.

You can feed the generated XML documentation to NDoc or Sandcastle to create more professional-looking help files.