To be honest – even though I installed Sandcastle quite a while ago I didn’t really got around to use it.

But since Kevin Downs announce the discontinue of NDoc I had to come up with some kind of replacement. So how about this castle-thinggy? So I hooked up with some MSBuild-script to get my documentation rolling.

Some 30 minutes later – and the vast peak of 650 MB of RAM which where consumed by the processe (thanks to Process-Explorer for providing this insight!) I finally had some nice CHM-file representing the documentation of one of my projects. I was already quite exited to finally see some light of documentation again.

When I looked at the documentation I realized, that everything from my projects was neatly documented – just as promised; well – everyting? Not really, there was some small piece missing: like all the code-comments that where supposed to be in the documentation!!!

Well, what the heck was BuildAssembler doing the last 30 minutes? It sure as hell was doing any documentation!! So after a periode of denial and disbelief I finally started to do some research on why this strange behavior would be.

It turned out, that Sandcastle would expect a comments.xml file in the directory from which Sandcastle is being started (not the directory where the tools reside!). OK – so what next? I don’t have just one XML-file containing my documentation, and it’s not even called comments.xml.

After digging deep into the config-files of sandcastle I finally figured that I could change comments.xml in the sandcastle.config and replace that with an expression (containing wildcards) which would identify my own XML-files.

So some 30 minutes later I finally found myself with a brand new documentation …