Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

22.2. Defining the Standards

You're now armed with a solution outline and a series of profiling rules. This is actually a good place to start to define the following:

• XML documentation comments

• Commenting standards

• Coding standards and practices

Commenting your code and following coding standards and guidelines should be commonplace during development. The rush to code bites us all and before we know it, we have hundreds of classes that don't conform to the required standards. When the out-of-box profiling functionality is enabled you can check the code every step of the way.

22.2.1. XML Documentation Comments

Using XML documentation commenting enables you to comment the code and generate documentation from the comments. In addition, the development environment will also use these comments to display tips during coding. Your code and configuration should be well-documented, and your requirements should be captured and traceable through the code. Throughout the project lifecycle, you'll have numerous meetings and discussions that will change the course of the project. These decision points should be captured in your code so that when you generate your documentation, it forms part of your overall delivery. The comments are the key to understanding the code and the following table contains a representative list of the XML commenting tags you can use in your code and their purpose.

Tag	Purpose	Example
<summary>	The <summary> tag is used to describe the class or class member. The tag should ...