GhostDoc goes 2010, VB (and is now a property of SubMain)

SubMain.Blog() - SubMain acquires GhostDoc, releases new version, integrates it with CodeIt.Right

“As announced earlier today we just closed the acquisition of the popular XML Comment helper tool GhostDoc. We, SubMain, will continue to evolve the tool and distribute it as a free product.

We are also announcing today the availability of the new version of GhostDoc v2.5.09150 which improves the user setup experience, adds support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and full support for Visual Basic.

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New in GhostDoc v2.5:

• Compatible with VS2010
• Support for VB - GhostDoc now has full support for VB
  • Removed "Enable experimental support for VB" option in Settings.
• Improved product setup experience
  
  • Single setup for all supported versions of Visual Studio - VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010.
  • Setup will detect older version installed and automatically uninstall it.
• Converted from VS Add-In to VS Package
  
• Resolved installation issues related to the VS Add-In model - by converting to VS Package

Download

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SubMain – GhostDoc

“GhostDoc is a free Visual Studio extension that automatically generates XML documentation comments for methods and properties based on their type, parameters, name, and other contextual information.

When generating documentation for class derived from a base class or for interface implementation (e.g. .NET Framework or your custom framework), GhostDoc will use the documentation that Microsoft or the framework vendor has already written for the base class or interface.

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Benefits

• Save keystrokes and time
• Simplify documenting your code
• Benefit of the base class documentation

If you follow good naming conventions in your code, then you will get very decent results on the summary GhostDoc generates.  When I see code that is not documented, it is as simple as hit Ctrl-Shift-D to have GhostDoc document it.

Features

• Generates XML comments based on code element type, parameters, name, and other contextual information.
• For a derived class uses the base class documentation.
• Assignable shortcut (default Ctrl-Shift-D)
• Configurable rules, acronyms and macros
• Import/Export of the configuration and the rules
• Option to re-build documentation

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Yes, Visual Studio already includes some built in XML comment support, but GhostDoc, which has been around for a while, extends that support, fleshing it out. And now that it officially supports VB, is something I’m going to take a look at (as I’m really unhappy with my XML commenting behavior and I want to improve it so if this tool makes that easier… ;)

Good to see this product given a new lease on life and I hope SubMain fulfills its comment in keeping it free for the long term…