GhostDoc News

While work on GhostDoc has slowed down a bit, I still haven't lost my enthusiasm for this project. It has proven to be useful for me in my daily work and feedback from users has been really positive so far. Most of the feature requests I receive are already on my TODO list, which I regard as a good thing as it shows that I'm on the right track with my plans. And it helps me to prioritize the items on the list -- so don't hesitate to drop me an email with your suggestion.

Plans for 1.3.0

The most wanted feature is proper handling of "On..." methods.... Oh yeah, this will be the next rule to be implemented and I plan to include it in 1.3.0. Interestingly, every person who wrote me about the funny mess the current version of GhostDoc is producing of e.g. "OnClosing" had a different idea of what the generated text should look like. Which leads to another problem: The more text GhostDoc actually adds to a simple processing of identifier names, the more people wish to change these additional texts to their liking (quite understandably).

That's why version 1.3.0 will allow users to customize generated texts by editing template texts containing macros for dynamic content. The macros are similar to those for the pre-build and post-build steps in the Visual Studio IDE. For example, the template text for the summary of a constructor is "Creates a new $(DeclaringTypeName.ShortNameAsSee) instance". As in Visual Studio, you don't have to type out the macro name, but can select it from a list (or, to be more exact, from a tree).

Here's what selecting a macro for e.g. the summary of a property will look like this (more or less, the screen shot is from a dialog in a GUI test, not the actual addin):

As usual I won't talk about a release date; when I feel comfortable releasing 1.3.0, I'll release it ;-)