Sandcastle and MTPS Conntent Service

Sandcastle uses MSDN and Technet Publishing System (MTPS) content service to resolve refeence links to MSDN. MTPS processes all the content at MSDN and Technet. MTPS Content Services are a set of web services for exposing the content in MTPS. With this web service, users have programmatic access to all that data via SOAP. For details see https://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/craig/archive/2006/06/12/27273.aspx. According to this blog (https://www.pluralsight.com/blogs/craig/archive/2007/06/21/47807.aspx) MTPS content service is getting over 1.3 million hits per day.

PackgeThis application also uses this service. I installed and tried PackgeThis. It's a cool GUI C# application for creating help files (.chm and .hxs) for the content obtained from the MSDN Library via the MSDN Content Service . You can select the content you want from the table of contents, build a help file, and use the content offline. This application allows users to develop personalized ebooks of MSDN content. Both help file formats also give full text search and keyword search.

PackgeThis CodePlex site has a code that illustrates how to use the MSDN Content Service to retrieve documentation from MSDN. It also shows how to build .hxs files and .chm files programmatically.

Cheers.

 

Anand..