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We make use of sandcastle (and SHFB) to generate class library documentation from inline XML comments. It's a great tool to maintain complete and professional looking reference + overview documentation, including correct code samples.

Unfortunately, it's also dog slow. It's by far the most time consuming step of our automated build, and it's starting to hurt. Is there any way to speed it up?

Community
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Wim Coenen
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  • I recommend you use [Live Documenter](http://theboxsoftware.com/products/live-documenter/ "Live Documenter") to view your documentation quickly. The program only views your documentation from the XML file that is generated on each build. When you are happy with your documentation, use sandcastle to actually build it. – Jared Beach Jun 25 '13 at 17:38
  • @JaredBeach: The problem is when Sandcastle is one among many steps executed when preparing a build (automated by a script, of course). Previewing the documentation may not even be a goal there; Sandcastle is simply run as one of the many tools when assembling the release files for whichever reason. – O. R. Mapper Oct 28 '17 at 22:17

2 Answers2

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If you have SdkLinkType=Msdn (see properties of your SHFB project) sandcastle connects to MSDN documentation using web service. That may slooowww build down in case of connection troubles. You may try to set SdkLinkType=None to turn off building MSDN links (in that case you will not have links to MSDN in your help). In my case that improved my build time 5 times (2 minutes instead of 10 minutes).

Vladimir Datsyuk
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The discussion group over at CodePlex is pretty active and knowledgable. Here's a semi on topic post (no help though): http://sandcastle.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=32267

user53794
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