Sandcastle Help File Builder 2016.5.28.0

The builder can produce an HTML Help 1.x or 2.x (.CHM) file

Sandcastle, created by Microsoft, is a tool used for creating MSDN-style documentation from .NET assemblies and their associated XML comments files. The current version is the May 2008 release. It is command line based and has no GUI front-end, project management features, or an automated build process like those that you can find in NDoc.

The Sandcastle Help File Builder application was developed to fill in the gaps, provide the missing NDoc-like features that are used most often, and provide graphical and command line based tools to build a help file in an automated fashion.

In addition to the help file builder, the following custom build components are supplied:
- A code block component that extends the XML comment tag with file inclusion, syntax highlighting, line numbering, collapsible #region and #if/#else/#endif sections, and a copy to clipboard option. This is useable in both reference and conceptual content.
- A post-transform component that can be used to add a logo image to the header of each page, make some minor adjustments to the syntax section, and add basic version information to the help topics. This is useable in both reference and conceptual content.
- A "show missing" component that adds "missing" notes for missing summary, returns, param, value, and remarks documentation tags and that can also auto-document constructors.
- An IntelliSense component used to extract the XML comments into files that can be used for IntelliSense. Only the basic set of tags needed for IntelliSense are exported and only for documented API members. This can greatly reduce the size of the IntelliSense files and removes all private implementation details when only documenting the public API.
- A help attribute component that can be used to add extra MSHelp:Attr attributes to each generated API topic. This is useful for adding extra DocSet and other attributes to the topics that are not added by the default Sandcastle transformations.
A JavaScript declaration syntax generator that can be used for regular JavaScript as well as Script# projects.
- A Resolve Conceptual Links build component that fixes some bugs in the standard version of the component and also adds some new features.
- A set of cached build data components that cache key information such as comment, reflection index information, and MSDN URLs across builds in order to speed them up.