April 07, 2008
Jan Schreuder wrote an article on Sandcastle for Microsoft's Dutch .NET Magazine and it's now available on the web. In it he provides an overview of Sandcastle and some instructions on how to use it. The article also features a few popular community tools that are available for use with Sandcastle; namely, Sandcastle Help File Builder, AjaxDoc (ScriptDoc) and DocProject. Jan mentions that DocProject is his preferred tool for automating Sandcastle and cites some of its advantages. Thanks!
The article is written in Dutch, but I was able to successfully translate it using Google Translator. First, download the PDF (visit Jan's blog for the link) and then save it as text (check the File menu). Copy and paste the text into the translator, select Dutch to English and press Translate. It works well enough to get the gist of the article.
Since the article was written there have been some important changes to Sandcastle and DocProject. Most notably, Sandcastle is now RTW on CodePlex and DocProject now provides first-class support for conceptual documentation using MAML, which of course wasn't mentioned in the article.
More Information about Sandcastle
For an up-to-date reference check out my (peer reviewed) Sandcastle Help article on CodePlex. It doesn't go into detail about how to use Sandcastle but it does provide a bullet-point overview and catalogs the different tools and documentation that exist elsewhere on the web. It's a good starting point.
More Information about DocProject
See my About DocProject article on CodePlex for an overview, screen shots and how to get started.
I also plan to write a few more DocProject tutorials in the future, as well as Sandcastle tutorials for things like how to create a custom presentation style and how to add custom tags, so keep an eye on my blog and DocProject's RSS feed on CodePlex.