Using Microsoft docs inside an ASP.Net Core website

Question

Microsoft's modern documentation website is produced largely from Markdown files hosted in on GitHub. Typically the documentation shows a left pane navigation menu and a document navigation section on the right. Here is an example:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/dotnet/fsharp/what-is-fsharp

Microsoft also produces a set of tools to help documentation authors and associated extensions for VS Code.

Is it possible to use this to host Microsoft documentation inside your own website? If so, are there any examples of doing this in an ASP.Net Core website?

Sebastian · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-23T00:32:20.647

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You might want to have a look at this blog post of one of the Microsoft employees working on Docs, describing on how to set up and use DocFX, which Microsoft Docs is based on.

~~Also, this GitHub issue gives a good summary of the current status.~~ (All issues in the linked repository have been deleted.)

Aside from that, the links you mentioned correspond to this Visual Studio Code extension package, where you might be especially in Docs Preview. It will help with writing and previewing Docs Markdown flavor syntax.

The repository links back to the packages GitHub page though, the source code for Docs Preview seems to be unavailable and also the license is not permissive at all, only granting Microsoft rights, but not granting you any in return. Even though you could look into the code of the downloaded extension manually, that would not grant you any permission to use any of the acquired code or knowledge in any commercial project.

edited Jan 23 '21 at 00:32

answered Jan 19 '21 at 00:28

Sebastian

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Thanks - that's a great help. I just need to get the styling right now. :) – Sean Kearon Jan 19 '21 at 08:22
You're welcome. :) Highly interested in this topic as well. If you find anything useful, please update. So will I. – Sebastian Jan 19 '21 at 18:36
I will indeed, @Sebastian. – Sean Kearon Jan 20 '21 at 13:39

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 05 '20 at 13:54

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I think you want to implement the functionality of displaying a text editor in which the user can enter Markdown text and want to show the preview of that markdown.

For this, you can use MarkDig or CommonMark package from Nuget

answered May 05 '20 at 13:54

Nilay Mehta

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Thanks @Nilay, but I was wanting to know specifically about self-hosting Microsoft docs. I've updated the question to make that more clear. – Sean Kearon May 06 '20 at 08:24

Using Microsoft docs inside an ASP.Net Core website

2 Answers2