Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Documentation Comments
The documentation comments feature allows you to include documentation of your program
in the form of XML elements. Visual Studio even assists you in inserting the elements, and will
read them from your source file and copy them to a separate XML file for you. This section does
not cover the topic of XML but presents the overall process of using documentation comments.
Figure 23-5 gives an overview of using XML comments. This includes the following steps:
You can use Visual Studio to produce the source file with the embedded XML. Visual
Studio's IntelliSense feature can automatically insert most of the important XML
elements.
Visual Studio reads the XML from the source code file and copies the XML code to a
new file.
Another program, called a document generator, can take the XML file and produce var-
ious types of documentation files from it.
Figure 23-5.
The XML comments process
Earlier versions of Visual Studio .NET contained a document generator that produced ele-
mentary documentation files. It was removed in Visual Studio 2005, and it's unknown whether
a version will be added back to a future version of Visual Studio. There are, however, a number
of free and third-party document generators that do an excellent job. They are easy to find on
the Internet.
