Windows Developer Power Tools

7.1 Documenting Your Source Code with GhostDoc

XML comments for C# or Visual Basic source code are a critical piece of your software’s documentation. They’re used for tooltip text in Visual Studio’s source code editor, providing information when a cursor hovers over a class or member; they’re also used outside Visual Studio, in tools like NDoc, to generate help files that are useful as application documentation.

Writing documentation can be somewhat tiresome, especially when documenting the implementation of an interface or base class members. Often the documentation already exists but has to be copied manually over and over again. Not only is this tedious, but it adds maintenance complexity and room for error. Writing comments for fairly obvious things like constructors or Boolean properties often enough will make you wonder why these have to be written manually. Fortunately, they don’t!

Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc is an add-in for Visual Studio that helps you write XML documentation comments for properties, indexers, and methods by reusing documentation inherited from base classes or interfaces or, if that is not possible, automatically generating documentation from method signatures, property or parameter types, property accessors, and so on. Creation of the documentation is controlled by a set of text-generation rules.

GhostDoc started as a tool for C# source code, but recent versions have added experimental support for Visual Basic.

GhostDoc at a Glance
Tool	GhostDoc
Version covered ...