docu
Simple documentation done simply
Getting started
Have you downloaded a binary or built the source? Good, we can continue. For this part of the guide I'm going to assume you're perfectly happy with the default appearance of the documentation (which is similar to the standard rdoc style), so I'm only going to cover how to actually produce the documentation.
Docu is comprised of a small console application with a templates directory; this directory contains all the Spark views that are used to build your documentation. These two need to stick together where-ever you put docu, but apart from that it doesn't care where it lives.
To generate documentation with docu, there are two things it needs: at least one assembly and it's associated XML documentation file that's generated by Visual Studio. You need to supply docu with the locations of the assembly (it can discover the XML file if it's in the same directory as the assembly) from the command-line. When you start it, docu interrogates the XML and the assembly to build up your documentation.
Running Docu is easy. Just run docu your-assembly-name.dll from the command-line
and you're away. Currently your documentation will be put in an output folder
in where-ever you ran docu; this will be customisable, but isn't just yet. So running the above
command will result in the following console output.
---------------------------------------- docu: simple documentation done simply ---------------------------------------- Starting documentation generation Generation complete
With that, you'll now have an output folder with several html files and folders. This directory is fully self contained so you can zip it up and ship it out to anywhere without any concerns about external references. That's it, that's all there is to using Docu.
You can see a slightly customised version of the default style in the Fluent NHibernate API docs.