Docfx-Plus: A template and a tool to enhance DocFx and migrate from SHFB (Sandcastle)

#tooling #documentation #showdev #dotnet

We used SHFB for many years mainly because of its excellent <code> block and NamespaceDoc support and it had been very stable but imho its theme and architecture is a bit outdated. DocFx is great in many ways but it misses some important features that we got used to with SHFB. So I created a new project docfx-plus to enhance DocFx. My aim was to update existing project docs that depend on some SHFB features, without changes to xml comments, to DocFx. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Live Demo - Sample API docs result for our other project DotMake Command-Line.

Just released DocFx-Plus v2.0.0 which now adds new convert command to convert/migrate your existing SHFB (Sandcastle Help File Builder) projects completely to docfx projects:

Project file (.shfbproj) will be converted to docfx.json
Content Layout files (.content) will be converted to toc.yml
MAML Topic files (.aml) will be converted to Markdown files (.md)
Namespace summaries will be converted to overwrite files (.md)
Other content files like images will be copied
By default content subfolder will be rebased to docs and icons, media subfolders will be rebased to images to match docfx conventions.