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21 January 2009

The Sandcastle Project.

Sandcastle is a project that started life on Codeplex. It's a Microsoft application for generating MSDN documentation from XML comments.

It is Rubbish!

That's not a statement I make blindly but after trying to get it to work (on and off for about a year). All the application does (at a high level) is take the xml documentation output file generated by Visual Studio during a build and create MSDN style documentation (both web based and compiled help file).

This should just be a case of applying a xslt file and job done.

Oh no.... not Sandcastle. Sandcastle takes around 20 minutes to generate the help file for a small utility application. Last time I attemptted to to build documentation for our main application on a build machine that we use (i.e. nothing and no-one else on it used solely for building software) it crashed to to maxing out the Ram (1gb).

There is an interesting article about the current state of the project here. To sum up the article ... the application is not worthy of using in a serious build environment.

If anyone has got it working I would be interested to find out more.

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