SharpDox Tips

SharpDox is an exciting open source C# documentation generator that is both easy to set up and easy on the eyes. That said, I’ve run into a couple of minor issues getting it up and running - here’s a summary of my experience in the hope that it saves you some time.

Note: I’m using SharpDox 1.0rc2 (released September 2015), so some of this information might be obsolete by the time you read it.

Tip: Finding the File Menu

The SharpDox UI is both good looking and functional. However, the file menu is easy to miss - it’s the document icon shown at the righthand end of the window heading:

Sometimes the file menu itself looks a bit odd, showing some odd-looking non-characters - perhaps a localisation issue:

The items on the menu, in order, are:

• New
• Open
• Save
• Save As
• Recent Items

Tip: Browsing the Output

In earlier (beta) releases of SharpDox, you could browse the HTML output just by opening the index.html file from the file system. This no longer works, and leaves you with a mysterious near-blank browser window:

Turns out that this is happening purely because the page is being loaded from a file:// URL instead of http://:

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem - you just need to browse it through an HTTP connection.

One way is to use IIS to host the page (easy if you’re already using IIS), but I found python
a useful alternative. This command will start up a simple HTTP server based in the current folder:

PS> python -m http.server 

I hope these tips save you some time and that you start using SharpDox on your projects.