I just finished reading Kiwidude's rant about using Sandcastle to generate documentation for .NET 2.0 applications and libraries. I'm using it for a couple of months now and I must agree that it's a lot more work then when using good, old NDoc. Generating documentation with NDoc is also a lot faster compared to Sandcastle. Even when you have a few assemblies it takes about half a century to generate a .chm file. If there wasn't some GUI helper tool like Sandcastle Help File Builder (which is excellent B.T.W.), I've given up a long time ago.
After tweaking some settings and playing around some more, it actually created a help file that I'm satisfied with. But still not even close to what I'm used to have with NDoc. Maybe I'll give NDoc 2.0 Alpha a try, for old times' sake.
I personally believe that writing good documentation is equally important than writing good code. I'm not saying that I can write good documentation, but at least I'm trying (I should give chapter 32 of Code Complete another read). It contributes to the readability of my code and the usability of my libraries. I think I'm not alone on this one, so why are there no better (free) alternatives than Sandcastle? If I've got the time (and the source code of NDoc 2.0 Alpha), maybe this would be a great open source opportunity.
