In this question I see that microsoft ships the XML documentation files for the BCL. I wonder if anyone knows if there an API within .net that can be used to look this up at runtime. I know we can parse the files manually using the XML api.
The use case is that we allow custom (read 3rd party) types/assemblies to be used in our system, and when selecting these in the UI, we’d like to extract the documentation as specified by the custom type/assembly creator or if not available provide other defaults.
I maintain the Jolt.NET project on CodePlex and have implemented a feature that performs this very task. Please refer to the Jolt library for more information.
In essence, the library allows you to programatically locate and query an XML doc comments file for an assembly using the metadata types in
System.Reflection(i.e.MethodInfo,PropertyInfo, etc…).