I was at the beach a week ago (one of the benefits of being in San Diego) and was watching kids build Sand Castles and reminded of how much fun building Sand Castles was as a kid.
What does this have to do with Microsoft Development? I am glad you asked. Microsoft has just released a new tool code named Sandcastle that will allow managed class library developers to generate documentation from their properly commented code.
Check out the SandCastle blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sandcastle for all the details. This is the same tool that Microsoft uses internally to generate .Net Framework Help Files. Keep in mind that this is really rough and everything is pretty manual. I am sure future releases will improve the integration of this with Visual Studio.
It’s cool that MS is finally paying some attention to this. It is long overdue that Microsoft is putting some effort into this after years of relying on Open Source, Third Party Products, or home grown solutions to generate documentation from Source Code. This is definitely something to keep an eye on as it develops.
Hopefully it will make generating documentation as fun as building Sand Castles was as a kid.
All the videos from the Office Developers Conference have been posted on MSDN. If you want to know all the latest on the changes coming in Office System 2007 this is a great place to start. I think this is really cool that they have made all of these publicly available. See all the details and links here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/erikaehrli/archive/2006/07/28/officedeveloperconferencevideos.aspx
If you are at all interested in Office Development, Erika’s Blog is a great place to start as she is the Site Manager for the Office Developer Center on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/).
Enjoy!