GhostDoc News

Development of GhostDoc is moving slowly, but steadily towards version 1.3.0, which will be the first release since October (wow, incredible how time flies by). So what has happened since the last GhostDoc News on this blog back in January? Looking from the outside, not much. If you remember the screenshot published back then, “all I did” was add the rule configuration tree to the configuration dialog and make all the buttons work:

Editing the settings of a rule looks something like this:

Behind the scenes, things have been far more complicated and time-consuming than expected. But the good news is that editing/exporting/importing the configuration (of rules and everything else) is pretty much finished.

So what’s the big deal about moving some configuration data around? I won’t go too much into detail, but simply imagine two computers A and B runnning GhostDoc (e.g. at home and at work) and you change some settings of a rule on A, change the priority of another (or maybe the same) rule on B. Then add some rules on A, remove some rules on B, and of course all these changes happened days after the last time you synced both computers. There are many opportunities to fry the user’s configuration data and while a fully automatic synchronization simply wasn’t possible, even just asking the user what to do (and then frying his/her data — nah, just kidding) already took a huge effort.

So what are the next steps? I’ll now write new text generation rules to solve some of the most often reported issues (e.g. “On…” methods) and the user defined rules mentioned in the January post. That will be pretty much the feature set for 1.3.0. Other ideas I have been playing around with will have to wait until 1.4.0 or later.

Visual Studio Beta 2

As people have been asking: Yes, I’ll look into releasing a version of 1.3.0 for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. There will not be a port of 1.2.1, though.

Other News

• I saw that GhostDoc is mentioned on the Microsoft Visual C# Developer Center — nice.
• There’s a new section on the GhostDoc home page, the “GhostDoc Hall of Shame” showing some of the more obscure results of the text generation. If you have weird/funny/sad/unexpected results, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.