NDoc with Visual Studio 2005 Beta1

I saw this post by Steve and realised that I hadn’t tried NDoc with Whidbey B1 yet. I was able to get it to work flawlessly, though perhaps my particular configuration is unusual.

I’m running inside a Virtual PC image, into this I added an absolute bare-bones installation of XP Pro, I’ve applied SP2 RC2 but no other updates – at this moment it doesn’t have the .NET Framework v1,1 installed. Next I installed Whidbey Beta1 with pretty much all the options including the MSDN documentation. I built a very simple C# Pocket PC project, usual hello world stuff, added the configuration option to build xml documentation and built the project.

I then went off to the NDoc website to download the v1.3 Beta installer. However this checks for .NET v1.1 and won’t install without it. Getting worried that installing v1.1 after v2.0 B1 might cause problems I promptly backed out. My alternative was to share a folder on the host PC and copy across NDoc 1.3 Beta from there. The program loaded flawlessly against the v2.0 Beta1 framework. I then had no problems documenting my .NETCF v2.0 project. So I guess this is the key, if NDoc is running against the v1.1 framework it will choke when faced with a v2.0 assembly, but I don’t intend to check this theory just yet (It’s taken long enough to get this virtual machine set up just the way I want it!

The solution should be to add a config file for NDoc which includes the following XML to prefer the v2.0 framework:-

<configuration>

   <startup>

      <supportedRuntime version=”v2.0.40607″ />

   </startup>

</configuration>

Save this file as:-
c:program filesNDoc 1.3binnet1.1NdocGui.exe.config
You may need to adjust this path depending on where you installed NDoc.

The next step will to be to test with some more complex projects (like the Smart Device Framework).