•Microsoft Sandcastle must be installed. Please always use the latest version, older versions may cause problems.

•After installing or upgrading Sandcastle you must restart Windows and configure Sandcastle (see the documentation) before performing the first import in Help & Manual. This is important, otherwise your environment variables may point to the wrong targets.

•Prepare your assemblies: Your source code must contain documentation using the commenting rules as set out in the Microsoft documentation.

1.Document your source code using the commenting rules described in the Microsoft documentation. If you don't document you won't get any documentation (Sandcastle is quite a good tool but it's not magic and can't read your mind). See the Microsoft documentation for details on how to comment and include and exclude items from your documentation.

2.Compile your assemblies with the documentation switch /doc:comments.xml

1.Select New Project in the File menu.

2.Select Sandcastle documentation file in the Import existing documentation section in the lower half of the page.

3.Enter the name and path for your new Help & Manual project and configure the other settings as you would for an empty new project.

4.Click on Continue with Options and select your assemblies, comment files and any dependent assemblies. You can choose multiple files in each category. You can also set a topic status to be set for your imported topics.

5.Click on Import. Help & Manual will then run Sandcastle in the background, generate the project and import it to a Help & Manual project. Depending on the size of your programming project this may take a while. The time this takes depends on Sandcastle and the speed of your computer, not on Help & Manual.

6.When the process is finished your Sandcastle project will appear in Help & Manual for editing. You can then edit and publish it just like any normal Help & Manual project:

To import Sandcastle documentation to an existing project just open the project and select Import in the File menu instead of New Project, all the other steps are the same as described above. The imported documentation will be added to the end of the existing TOC.

You can set conflict management settings for existing topics that have changed in the Options screen.