As i wrote earlier i have tried out the CTP version of Sandcastle. And it is a CTP by which i mean that it’s not a finished product. But i looks very promising i must say.
One of the things i miss in Sandcastle (CTP) is an easy integration with MSBuild so that you can rebuild your documentation as part of your continuous integration. Sandcastle in itself is a bunch of tools to be used a the command prompt and they can (but not easy) integrated.
Luckily this has been done for us already, through some well-initiated sources i found an application that builds on top of Sandcastle (CTP), that fills the gap surrounding MSBuild integration. I haven’t have time to try it out yet but will sure get around to it
Also - from the same source, i got an performance tip that cut the document generation time from 17 to 10 min in our application (11 projects, 85 000 lines of code, 6500 topics). Apparently there are some link resolving going on while Sandcastle generate the documentation. By default this is set to “MSDN” which translates to “use the MSDN web service to resolve links”. Set this to “None” for better performance. (Still slower than my NDoc alpha though :))