I am working with Sandcastle for a while now and I am also used to find xml inline comments in the .Net Source Reference. They usually match exactly the descriptions found on msdn.
Since .Net 4.6 and .Net Core it seems like Microsoft creates their comments differently.
(Cannot find them in the .Net Source Reference anymore)
An example:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/system.string.padright(v=vs.110).aspx
This method has a comment in msdn but I am not able to find it in the source:
http://referencesource.microsoft.com/#mscorlib/system/string.cs,56cb688f4f1dc9e4
I am wondering how they are doing it right now with .Net 4.6 and how they will/are doing it with .NET Core. Can anyone confirm and explain this to me?
EDIT:
Since .Net Core is Open Source we should be able to figure this out. But I cannot find any information about it.
EDIT2: Since .Net Core is Open Source I think we should have access or at least be able to get access to their internal "secret" documentation tool. How else can we further develop the .Net Core and write documentation. Does anyone know that tool or where to find it?
Disclaimer Developer of MSDN engineering team, maintain both the legacy platform and the new one.
Firstly, we do have multiple document generation tools/solution for MSDN, but the core part is reflection, always. We leverage automatic tools to help extract API signatures and comments from source code, then save them in XML or Markdown files. The latest tool we are using is DocFX http://dotnet.github.io/docfx/.
Secondly, as all the API signatures and comments are stored in files, technical writers are able/allowed to modify them to make them more readable (now we have gap between source code and final product, right?). Besides, writers will add separate files, aka Conceptual Documents, to fill in description, code samples and guidance to corresponding API.
Lastly, all these files will be converted to xliff files for localization.
So in short, these documents are generated from source code comments and writers' input. The later one will be moved to GitHub later on and community contributions are welcome.