New: F# Library Documentation and HTML Doc generation

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I'm very pleased to announce that the F# library documentation has just made a quantum leap into the 21st century of XMLDocs and HTML pages. A first cut of the pages starts at

research.microsoft.com/fsharp/manual/namespaces.html

Please let us know what you think. Links into the above pages should be stable so you can bookmark them. The tree is also searchable using Google and MSN Search, which have been busy indexing the above pages over the last few days. I’m sure you will agree this is a huge step in our efforts to make F# more accessible. The documentation is will also included in the next soon-to-be-published release (see fsharp-manual\namespaces.html).

A big thank-you to James Margetson (as always), and also Robert Pickering, who a while back worked hard to place NDoc-generated HTML for the library up on his website, which helped us iron out a number of problems in the XMLDoc support for F#. NDocs are also excellent for C# programmers using F# libraries. In the end we figured that docs are best if they take into account F# syntax, concepts and succinctness, so rolled our own HTML generation. We hope you like it!

 

I'll also mention that in the next release you will be able to auto-generate your own HTML documentation:

  • See the various “--html" options on fsc.exe

  • I’d be interested to see the results of auto-generation over your codebase.

  • If you place your documentation tree for your assembly parallel to the F# assembly documentation trees then cross-links into the F# documentation will work correctly.