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Sandcastle Help File BuilderVersion 1.9.4.0
Potential Breaking Changes
  • The R:Project topic ID is now suffixed with the value of the project's HtmlHelpName property value to keep it unique so that MS Help Viewer output works correctly with a root namespace container. Any spaces in the value are replaced with underscores. This may break existing projects if you manage project summary comments in an external file. You will need to update the member ID of the R:Project entry to contain the help name used in the project (i.e. R:Project_MyHelpFileName).

Sandcastle 2.7.0.0 Support

The following changes were made to support the latest Sandcastle release:

  • Removed BuildReflectionData.bat as the script is now part of the Sandcastle file set.

  • Removed the SandcastleMRefBuilder project and assembly. The assembly binding redirection code has been moved into Sandcastle's AssemblyResolver class in MRefBuilder. The Assembly Binding Redirection plug-in has been updated to use the Sandcastle version now.

  • Removed the JavaScriptDeclarationSyntaxGenerator from the project and changed all references to use the new version in the Sandcastle SyntaxComponents assembly.

  • Removed ResolveConceptualLinksComponent from the project and changed all references to use the new version in the Sandcastle BuildComponents assembly as the changes have been merged into it.

  • Removed FixScriptSharp.xsl from the project templates. The changes it contained have been merged into Sandcastle's copy of that file.

  • A BuildAssemberVerbosity property was added to let you specify what messages the BuildAssembler tool will report. This can help to significantly reduce the build log size for large projects.

  • Updated the CodeColorizerLibrary and SandcastleComponents projects to .NET 4.0 as the Sandcastle tools are now built with .NET 4.0.

  • Thanks to Don Fehr for the changes needed to support the new Sandcastle VS2010 presentation style.

Other Changes Made in This Release
  • Fixed a bug in the topic previewer that caused it not to navigate to the topic being edited when opened.

  • Fixed a bug in the build engine that caused it to not add the help library manager and install scripts to the list of MS Help Viewer files.

  • Fixed a bug in the HTML extract tool that caused it not to close the final index file element if it had children.

  • Fixed a bug in the conceptual content layout file editor that caused a crash when an empty container node was selected while adding a new topic to the file.

  • Reworked how the topic previewer and entity references windows load content layout files so that they do not cause open files to look like they have been edited when they contain items marked as invisible in the TOC.

  • Added a new XamlConfiguration build action value for use with XAML syntax configuration files. Also added the related XAML syntax item template. This is used to define XAML syntax configuration settings for the BuildAssembler XAML Usage syntax generator.

  • Added support for rendering links in token elements that are within relatedTopics elements in the topic previewer.

  • Added the BrandingPackageName property to allow specification of a branding package name for MS Help Viewer files.

  • Added an option to the Assembly Binding Redirection plug-in to allow using the GAC to resolve unknown assembly references. This may help in cases where a copy of the reference assembly is not available on the file system.

  • Added an option to the output deployment plug-in to rename the MSHA file to HelpContentSetup.msha.

  • The help viewer install and remove scripts produced as part of the MS Help Viewer build format have been temporarily modified to provide some support for installing and removing content from Help Viewer 2.0. They both call the Help Viewer 2.0 content manager tool directly to install or remove the content if the script is passed the command line parameter "H2". Full support will be built into the Help Library Manager Launcher tool in a future release.

  • Added support to the API build configuration files to resolve conceptualLink elements within XML comments files. This allows adding links to conceptual topics within XML comments that will work regardless of the help file format. To use them, add a conceptualLink element with a target attribute set to the GUID of the conceptual topic to which it should generate a link. Inner text is also supported. If omitted, the topic title will be used.

  • Thanks to Thomas Levesque for the following:

    • Additions to the website files to allow showing a direct link to the topics.

    • The suggestion to use the JavaScript serializer for the full text index files. The new JSON format reduces the size of the full text index files quite a bit compared to the binary format and makes it possible to implement other index and keyword search pages using alternate back ends such as PHP. The use of the new serializer does require a minimum framework version of .NET 3.5 for the ASP.NET website pages.

    • The PHP website files. To view the website via the PHP files, open the index.php page.

See Also

Other Resources