Generate code documentation xml for ASP.NET 2.0 website

[Carl Johansen]

Hi all,

I have an ASP.NET 2.0 website in Visual Studio 2005 (ie I open it with File
| Open Web Site...). I have put XML comments in the source code in the
App_Code directory (with <summary> tags, etc) and I want to turn these into
XML files that can then be run through NDoc (along with app_code.dll) to
produce help files. I've even found an (apparently stable) port of NDoc for
v2.0 of the framework. So no problem, I'll just go to Project Properties |
Compile and check the "Generate XML documentation file" box... uh-oh... this
isn't a project, so there _is_ no Project Properties dialog. Hmmm, maybe
"aspnet_compiler" has the /doc option... Nope. Wait, I know: I'll add
"/doc+" to the vbc.rsp file so that it becomes a default compiler option...
No dice; VS and aspnet_compiler use the /noconfig option, so they ignore the
defaults. Now what? Does this mean I can't put things in App_Code if I want
to document them?

If that's too easy for you, then how about the same question for code-behind
files? This one was easy in Visual Studio 2003, because these were built
into one big /bin assembly. But in VS 2005 there seem to be two issues: (1)
no Project Properties, so no way to set the "generate XML documentation
file" option, and (2) no obvious assembly containing the code-behind code
that I can give to NDoc.


Thanks very much in advance for any ideas you'd care to share.
Carl Johansen
www.carljohansen.co.uk - a blog free zone

 

[carlj]

To answer my own question (for VB App_Code directories): I found a
kludgy workaround. I added a <compilers> section to my web.config (by
copying what was in my default machine.config). In it I added a
<compilerOptions> element with "/doc+" as an option. This means that
when I build the site using VS or aspnet_compiler, a file called
App_Code.xml is placed in the same random directory under
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files
as App_Code.dll. If you are using aspnet_compiler with an explicit
target directory, you will find that App_Code.dll gets copied to the
target directory but App_Code.xml doesn't. I wrote a post-build script
to search in Temporary ASP.NET Files and copy the latest version of
App_Code.xml (since the exact location sometimes varies from build to
build)

I suspect that this trick would not work with a C# site, because in C#
you don't have the "/doc+" option; you have to specify a filename for
the xml doc file. Since the VS/aspnet_compiler build processes consist
of multiple invocations of the compiler, only the last invocation's xml
file would be available.

Carl
www.carljohansen.co.uk - a blog free zone