CodeX is an XML based tool which generates beautiful HTML code documentation from comments in your source code.
CodeX is developed in a combination of C#, MSBuild and XSLT 2.0. XMLPrime is used in order to perform the XSLT2 transformations, and so a copy is currently required in order to build the documentation. The evaluation version of XMLPrime is sufficient to evaluate CodeX.
The first official release of the product will be able to produce MSDN style documentation from XML code documentation tags (///) in C# projects (a la Sandcastle). Configuration of the documentation will be performed directly from within Visual Studio.
The main goals of this project are to be:
- Beautiful documentation.
- Easy to use. You should be able to set up documentation for your product in 10 minutes.
- Flexible.
- Extensible. It should be easy to add support for new themes, languages and custom documentation styles with XSLT2.
- Integrated with Visual Studio.
- Fast. Ideally it should be possible to edit code documentation interactively.
- Well documented :)
The source code for this project originated as an internal tool which was developed in order to generate the XmlPrime API documentation, and as a means for testing XmlPrime itself. The source code has been kindly donated to me by my former employer.