### Creating a New Project and Adding Assemblies

If you use Visual Studio.NET as your development environment, the easiest way to create a new NDoc project is to select the "New From Visual Studio" button on the toolbar.

After browsing to your solution file, you will be asked to select a configuration within the solution. This determines what assemblies (debug or release versions) will be used to generate your documentation.

The Configuration Selection Dialog

Once you select a configuration, the NDoc project designer will add all of the managed assembly projects from that solution to your new NDoc project.

If you don't use Visual Studio.NET, you can add assemblies to your project either by browsing for them with the Add button, or dragging them into the assembly list view directly from Window Explorer. Make sure that you are generating XML documentation during your compiles, otherwise NDoc will only be able to produce minimal documentation...

### Choosing a Documenter

NDoc ships with a number of different options for generating documentation for your code. Each different format is referred to as a Documenter. Each Documenter determines it own layout, formatting, and in some cases content for the generated documentation.

The two most popular documenters are the MSDN documenter, which generate compiled CHM type documentation similar to MSDN online help, and the VS.NET documenter, which generates compiled html help compatible with Visual Studio.NET.

NDoc Documenters

All documenters share certain settings, such as what types of members to document. Each documenter also has its own set of custom settings which you can use to control the exact content of your documentation.

For more details about configuring documenters, refer to the Documenters section.

### Building the Documentation

Once you've chosen a Documenter, and configured it to your liking, hit the Build Button to create your documentation. As the project builds and compiles, you will see build status in the Output Window at the bottom of the Designer Screen, as well as in a progress indicator on the status bar.

NDoc Build Progress

### Viewing the Documentation

Once the build completes, you can view the resulting documentation by clicking the View button.