What's new in August 2006 Sandcastle CTP

August 2006 Sandcastle CTP is currently available at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e82ea71d-da89-42ee-a715-696e3a4873b2&DisplayLang=en. Here is a summary of what's new in this CTP version:

  1. Firefox support for Sandcasltle generated HTMs
  2. 3 different link options (local, Index and MSDN) in sandcastle.config file.
  3. /internal+- option in MrefBuilder enables documentation of private APIs to be produced for the internal consumption of development teams
  4. Support for multi-dimensional arrays
  5. Support for CHM Index and root node. Additional transforms are added to CHM generation process to accomplish this.
  6. Support for all C# tags and html style elements in code comments
  7. Abilty to use environment variables in config files
  8. Changes to syntax for XSLTransform

Note: Sandcastle users should take note that, as part of the resolution of the XslTransform crash bug, the syntax for XslTransform has changed. To specify an XSLT you use the /xsl option, and to specify multiple XSLTs you specify multiple /xsl options. Thus the old syntax
XslTransform AddOverloads.xsl reflection.org | XslTransform AddGuidFileNames.xsl /out:reflection.xml

Has now become:
XslTransform /xsl:AddOverloads.xsl /xsl:AddGuidFileNames.xsl reflection.org /out:reflection.xml

Or, if you prefer:
XslTransform /xsl:AddOverloads.xsl,AddGuidFileNames.xsl reflection.org /out:reflection.xml

Environment variables are expanded on all input strings. XslTransform no longer supports pipelining.

Bug Fixes:

The following bugs have been fixed for this CTP.

  1. BuildAssembler /? shows the usage as “TocBuilder” and incorrect information.
  2. XslTransform with no cmd line parameters crashes.
  3. Sandcastle.config file would support environment variables for all paths instead of just some of them.
  4. Typo: Info: ResolveReferenceLinksComponent: Preparing to querry MSDN topic URL web service. “querry” should be “query”.
  5. Error: An error occured while performing the transofmation. The error message is:… “transofmation” should be “transformation”.
  6. BuildAssembler: System.Null referenceException being thrown and tool dies for MREF build.
  7. Exception tag from XML comments are not being populated in .chm file.
  8. Sandcastle: CHM compile warnings should be fixed.
  9. Sandcastle: Buildassembler is throwing exception and the resulting CHM has several issues.
  10. Sandcastle losing encoding for localization builds.
  11. Typos in various "error" messages.
  12. Protected members are treated as public and C++ set methods for properties are documented with an extra comma
  13. Sandcastle:Lists are not documented correctly
  14. Sandcastle: Extra brackets in front of every parameter name
  15. Sandcastle - System.NullReferenceException related to interface implementation
  16. Sandcastle: BuildAssembler has a problem with multi-dimensional arrays
  17. Sandcastle: Types are missing
  18. Unhandled exception thrown by XslTransform
  19. Sandcastle is dropping the <paramref name=”blah”/> text
  20. BuildAssembler throws exception during attempt to overwrite a read-only file
  21. Sandcastle: Generated htm files are missing reflection information.
  22. Enable use of environment variables within Manifold BuildAssembler .config files
  23. Sandcastle: Issue with interfaces inheriting from generic interfaces.
  24. Sandcastle transforms does not process all XML elements from code comments
  25. BuildAssembler throws exception when processing WinSDK dlls