I'm working on parsing out the XML file that is generated when you pass /doc as a compiler option. We had previously been using VSDocman to handle the parsing and documentation website generation, along with custom topics. We ultimately didn't like the web site generated by VSDocman though and want to do something more robust with MVC.
It's easy enough to parse the XML file, but I'd like to also add custom topics like I can in VSDocman to the XML file. Is that not possible with the built in documentation support in Visual Studio? Will I have to create a custom XML file that manages all of that, writing it manually (or building a custom tool to generate it) and parsing it during my /doc parsing?
Microsoft itself does not define a standard format for extra documentation. Thus, you have to decide what tool to use next and then use the format it supports.
Besides, XML is so flexible that you can try to transform it from one format to another, so I assume it is not a big deal.