Help & Manual delivers Source Code Documentation for Visual Studio

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Help & Manual delivers Source Code Documentation for Visual Studio

This announcement was prepared by EC Software.

Help & Manual, one of the most popular help authoring tools among software developers, can now also generate Visual Studio source code documentation by importing projects from Microsoft Sandcastle.
Help & Manual from EC Software has always been the best tool for writing online help for software applications. With its power and ease of use, Help & Manual is firmly established as the favorite help authoring tool for software developers across all languages. It's the perfect solution for creating and updating application help and documentation in multiple formats.

Source code documentation is a slightly different story, however. All serious programmers know their source code needs to be documented. The question is how, in how much detail and in which format. Source code documentation belongs in the source code, you will say. And you're absolutely right!

For Microsoft Visual Studio programmers, there is already a de facto standard for source code documentation: Microsoft Sandcastle, a command line tool that extracts source code comments and outputs HTML or compiled HTML Help, ready to deploy. But Sandcastle does not have a text editor, and Help & Manual now fills this gap in a stunning manner.

Help & Manual now runs Microsoft Sandcastle to read your Visual Studio source code and comments, builds the documentation structure for your functions and classes, integrating the comments found in the source. Then, instead of compiling the "finished" CHM or HTML files, it transforms the Sandcastle XML data into a Help & Manual XML project, which you can then edit in Help & Manual, alone or in a team, and publish in any of the many supported output formats.

That gives you two documentation tools in one! Help & Manual is an integrated XML-based help authoring suite for developing interactive help in HTML-based formats and print-style documentation as PDF files. It radically simplifies and accelerates the documentation process with an intuitive user interface that is very similar to the modern word processors that all computer users are already familiar with. Authors can focus on writing and editing their content rather than struggling with the details and quirks of multiple output formats - all that is handled by the program.

Help & Manual 5.4 is available from $349 per single user license (Standard) to $499 (Professional Edition).

You can download a free trial of Help & Manual from the link below. Note that for source code documentation, Microsoft Sandcastle needs to be installed separately!

Download Help & Manual (14 days trial): http://www.helpandmanual.com/downloads.html.

Download Microsoft Sandcastle (free): http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb608422.aspx.

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