Discussion on:

Create .NET documentation with Microsoft's Sandcastle

did this in error

I've used both NDOC and Sandcastle and I'm happy that we have something... so I'm a little slow to complain. However, I'm not impressed. Yes, the application captures the content but its indexing and output options have much to be desired. Indexing does not keep the context of my class structure. If I have a standard class structure that involves internal classes all named "a", I get X number of index hits on "a" instead of A.a and B.a and C.a. This lack of contextual information makes the indexing, in my opinion, useless. Also, the only output format seems to be these Microsoft help files. NDOC had many output formats. In my opinion, this was a half-hearted attempt at creating a documentation tool.

The DITA Open Toolkit supports a large number of useful output formats. The trick would be the initial transformation to the DITA "topic" and "map" XML formats.

It sounds to me like it should be possible to take the initial output generated by Sandcastle and transform it into something usable by the DITA Open Toolkit, or at least transform it into something that a 3rd party XML editor might be able to use to create DITA topics (and a DITA map) that could then be fed into the DITA OT.

Tony,
A class diagram add-on component is available for Sandcastle. It adds the Visual Studio class diagrams to the document with hyperlinks to the classes. It is available free at castleapps.com.

Thanks for the informative article.