• Part 1: How to Document your PowerShell Library
• Part 2: Using C# to Create PowerShell Cmdlets: The Basics
• Part 3: Documenting Your PowerShell Binary Cmdlets
• Part 4: Unified Approach to Generating Documentation for PowerShell Cmdlets

PowerShell’s Get-Help cmdlet is the conduit for getting details of a cmdlet, whether that cmdlet is written in C# or in PowerShell. Thus, one needs to be able to provide content for that help when writing in either language. From its early days, PowerShell has provided full support for documentation comments (“doc-comments”) in PowerShell code: you could instrument your functions with doc-comments and Get-Help would use those to generate its help. Until recently though, this has been rather arduous to do in C# code. Essentially, you had to perform a laborious and error-prone process to build your own MAML documentation file: Even with custom editors built for the task, it was a chore to keep your documentation in sync with your code.

Then in 2015, XmlDoc2CmdletDoc came along and filled in the crucial gap: you can now instrument your C# cmdlet code just like any other C# code, and just like PowerShell code. Therefore, you can nowadays easily support Get-Help from either C# or PowerShell and keep your documentation maintained right alongside your code.

That much allows you to feed proper details to Get-Help to show help for a single command. This follows in the venerable tradition of the Unix “man” command or the DOS “help” command, presenting documentation for a single command. Unlike those other environments, however, PowerShell is not just a shell language, but also a rich programming language. Therefore, PowerShell needs to be able to provide a navigable documentation tree such as is provided by Sandcastle for C# or by Javadoc for Java. To give you the same ease of use, you can use the DocTreeGenerator utility, which supports this key capability for PowerShell. It supports modules written in C# or in PowerShell, or in a combination of both.

The accompanying wallchart shows at a glance all the pieces you need to build your documentation using the above tools in concert with Visual Studio and PowerShell.