[Mono-list] Why doesn't mcs generate XML documentation?

[Mathias Hasselmann]

Giuseppe Greco wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> why doesn't mcs generate XML documentation?

Guess mainly 'cause nobody felt the need to implement it?

BTW: To my knowlegde the Mono project decided not to use inline 
documentation for Mono's library documentation. Details of that decision 
should be available in the mail archives. To my knowledge the monodoc 
module contains tools to extract documentation stubs from source code...

> [...], and I would like to know how can I generate
> documentation like the one generated by hcc.exe on Windows
> (hcc.exe generates either compiled or HTML documentation from
> the XML files generated by csc.exe when the "-doc" option is
> specified).
> 
> Is there something similar to hcc.exe (Help Compiler Workshop)
> for linux?

A free program generating HTML from those XML files is ndoc 
(http://ndoc.sf.net/). Don't know if it runs on Linux now, last time I 
checked it didn't. Since it's implemented in C# it shouldn't be _that_ 
hard to fix the glitches. ;-)

Personally I am using Doxygen (http://www.doxygen.org/) to  generate 
inline documenation. Ok, it's C# support isn't perfect, but useable. 
Additionally it's able to parse many other languages. Something that's 
important for me. Something which csc.exe naturally cannot offer.

To get all your documentation into one file: Doxygen can generate the 
additional files needed by hcc, needed to generate compiled HTML Help.
Works quite well. It also appears to be able to generate PDF files, but 
I have to admit that I have not used this option yet.

If you care about your MS-style inline-doc comments: Once wrote a VIM 
script doing the conversion, when I was faced with the task to switch 
from MS style to doxygen style. Pretty sure that I still can find the 
script, when I search. ;-)

Ciao,
Mathias