I’ve been really struggling with the motivation to get CR_Documentor updated for Sandcastle support.  The problem is threefold:

1. .NET 1.1 XSLT performance is pretty slow (slow enough that it’s noticeable when the preview refreshes) so the code actually manually recurses through an XML document object and generates HTML on the fly.  Every time either rendering engine changes the way they do things (or fixes a defect), I have to manually implement that transformation in code using XmlNode and XmlDocument objects.  I can’t just take the changes to the XSLT that the products include.
2. Since I’m working at pre-compilation time, generating the method signature in a nice formatted way is a huge pain, and it’s different for each rendering engine.  Doing this involves manually running around the parsed code tree in DXCore and converting the parsed nodes into nicely formatted, human readable HTML.
3. CR_Documentor was originally a one-trick pony, so the rendering mechanism isn’t really… “pluggable.”  I started refactoring to get there, but because the generation of the HTML is so specific to each renderer and there’s so much to it… frankly, I’ve gotten overwhelmed.

As I’ve said before, I can’t open source the thing and get help because there are legal ramifications around it involving Lutz working at Microsoft now and the code originally being his.  I’d love to get some help on it, but it’s not really a possibility.

Anyway, I started down the path of getting Sandcastle support in there and it’s become pretty beastly.  What I’d like to do is actually make use of XSLT so I can vastly simplify the rendering for each preview type.  It would also allow me to more easily directly take the XSLT from the various products (NDoc, Sandcastle) and use them with very minor, if any, modifications.  Making it easier to take advantage of that would also make it easier for me to add new preview styles (Sandcastle, for example, has multiple templates available).

.NET 2.0 has vastly better XSLT performance than .NET 1.1 - enough that I think it’d be feasible to transform using XSLT rather than manual document manipulation.  However, if I convert to .NET 2.0, I have a few problems:

1. I’ll only be able to support Visual Studio 2005 and later.  (I’m pretty sure DXCore won’t let me run .NET 2.0 plugins from inside VS 2003, though admittedly I haven’t tried it.)
2. I will probably have to remove features like the ability to highlight “unsupported tags” or set a “supported tag set” for troubleshooting your documentation.  I’ll still be able to notify you of errors (like if your doc doesn’t parse out right) but the supported tag set thing was only really workable because I had programmatic control over the rendering at that level.

Does anyone care?  Any big voices to continue supporting VS 2003?  If not, I’m going to scrap the garbage I’ve been trying to do to get this done and start working on getting it to transform using XSLT.