How to change the xml documentation file name in Visual Studio Projects
If you haven’t used Sandcastle yet, please have a look at it. It’s easy to create developer documentation with it, especially for dlls you want to share with others. And the comment feature is already included in Visual Studio 2005, so why not use it?
Probably you also now the Sandcastle Help File Builder which will create a HTML-Help or Webpages including your help. Very convenient.
But now I had a problem: While my dll was called something like ‘Windows.Media.Audio.dll’, the xml documentation file was only ‘Windows.Media.xml’. Of course it contained all necessary elements, but it was not automatically found by Sandcastle Help File Builder (but it could be configured manually) and even more important, also Intellisense does not work with this file. I could manually change the filename of the documentation xml to ‘Windows.Media.Audio.xml’, but this could also be done automatically.
Fortunately there is a post from Linda Liu from Microsoft Online Community Support. Even though there is no configuration option within visual studio, you could open your project file (e.g. Audio.vbproj) and edit the values in XML-Tag called ‘DocumentationFile’ (There might be multiple Tags with this name depending on your config).
Now it works fine: Sandcastle Help File Builder automatically uses this .xml, and also Intellisense displays the help now. Very nice!