News

Microsoft Issues June CTP of 'Sandcastle' Documentation Tool

• By Chris Kanaracus
• June 21, 2007

New in the June rev is a presentation layer named "VSORCAS," an apparent play off the former codename of the upcoming Visual Studio 2008.

VSORCAS is aimed at improving the experience of navigating through and searching documentation, according to Microsoft.

"This new documentation presentation layer targets developer audience who need to find information quickly and easily in our documentation that grows significantly with every Visual Studio/.NET Framework release," read a statement on the Microsoft Sandcastle blog.

VSORCAS' features are set to include a persistent language filter, which will automatically show the related files, examples and other information related to a programming language of a user's choosing.

There are other filters as well, including the ability to filter based according to a type's supported frameworks and based on member types, according to a posting on the blog.

VSORCAS also seeks to improve the visual experience of reading documentation by communicating more data in a smaller amount of screen real estate.

The CTP is available for download here.

You can read more about the planned features here.