What is the status of Sandcastle and are there alternatives?

Question

Wikipedia currently lists the Development Status of the Sandcastle documentation generation software as "Stalled," citing the lack of recent releases. (There's actually contradictory information on this, though: their section on the history of the tool says the most recent release was 2008, the sidebar says the most recent release was 2010, and the GitHub project shows commits a mere 22 days ago).

The Sandcastle Codeplex page itself states that it's no longer under active development by Microsoft - it seems to have been turned over to an individual developer.

What's the actual status of this project? Is there a recommended alternative?

Answer 1

Eric Woodruff took over Sandcastle in 2012. Due to reservations Microsoft's legal department had related to transferring the project itself, Woodruff forked the project as Sandcastle Help File Builder. Microsoft published a statement on the project website, stating that they discontinued development of the project and suggested users moved on with Woodruff's fork.

The project is still in active development, and the latest release (as per the time of this writing), Help File Builder and Tools v2017.12.30.2, was 31st December 2017.

See also:

• Sandcastle on github.
• Project status discussion on CodePlex (discontinued) via archive.org.
• Summary of Sandcastle's bumpy road to fame by Christoph Nahr.

Answer 2

I don't know what Microsoft recommends, if anything, but Document!X can generate documentation from class libraries. I used it for a project a few years ago and was quite impressed with its capabilities and design.