Contents tagged with GhostDoc
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GhostDoc in "Windows Developer Power Tools"
Today I received my copy of “Windows Developer Power Tools” by James Avery and Jim Holmes, to which I contributed a chapter about my Visual Studio add-in GhostDoc, comparable in scope to what I wrote for “Visual Studio Hacks”. For the chapter in “Tools” (which grew to 7 pages compared to 5 in “Hacks”), I took the opportunity to be more clear about what GhostDoc can do, and what it cannot achieve, and what to look out for e.g. when re-using inherited documentation.A small error was introduced in editing of my original text (which by the way turned out surprisingly tame considering the fact that English is not my native language): Unlike suggested by the text on page 314 “when you want to document a method or class”, GhostDoc does not generate documentation for classes. On a sidenote: While this is a feature that has been requested a couple of times, it hasn’t been implemented yet. And honestly, I’m not quite sure of the value of such a feature, let alone what exactly it is supposed to do (most of the examples I have received so far show a certain ELIZA effect concerning the belief in GhostDoc’s abilities, but I’m still open to suggestions).
To bring the topic back to the book: at more than 1300 pages, it contains a lot of stuff, covering more than 170 free and open source tools for developers. The concept of the book is to describe each tool on roughly 3 to 10 pages, helping you to decide whether or not to give it a shot, and if so, how and where to start. If “Windows Developer Power Tools” saves you from either missing a really good tool, or installing some crud software in the process of finding one, the book has reached its goal and saved you a lot of time (and maybe even trouble). As one reviewer puts it “You could spend your time tracking down these applications, but why?”. From what I can tell by a first quick glance at the table of contents and skimming the pages, definitely an interesting book.
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Article "Introduction to GhostDoc" up on DotNetSlackers
Some time ago Sonu Kapoor, webmaster of dotnetslackers.com, asked me to write an article about my Visual Studio add-in GhostDoc. It took me some time to find an empty spot in my busy schedule, but the article is now finally online. It is an introduction to GhostDoc that may be interesting for those who haven’t tried GhostDoc yet and would like to read a bit more about the features before actually downloading and installing it.
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Whoops... I Just Asked a Question and Now I Won a Prize...
Ok, the title sounds like what happens on developer conferences when you ask a technical question and suddenly the speaker pulls out a t-shirt or a book and hands it over to you. No, this one’s bigger… much bigger.
Back in summer, I participated in the Microsoft Visual Studio Extensibility Contest with my add-in GhostDoc (did I just hear somebody yawn in the background? I’m sorry ;-). I thought to myself “Hey, GhostDoc is a valid entry according to the rules, it has a working setup, nice documentation and people like it, why not give it a try. Version 1.9.5 is almost finished, entering the contest shouldn’t be much effort”.
Ok, forget about the “not much effort” part. The organizers wanted the projects as source code, to compile the projects and pass the result to the judges – I guess to be able sort out at least some of the more obvious trojans that jokesters would send in. Releases of GhostDoc are built using a combination of a commercial tool (Visual Build) and a couple of custom-built tools and I couldn’t/didn’t want to give out my complete build environment, template-based documentation generation, CHM-builder, etc.. So most of the work consisted of building a package that could be copied on a fresh machine and would successfully build the MSI. Sounds easy, but it’s the small details that cost way too much time.
Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining; my colleague Jens Schaller wrote an add-in (SonicFileFinder) specifically for the contest from scratch and he definitely pulled some all-nighters and others have invested a lot of time as well.
Anyway, when I was notified I didn’t win I wasn’t too disappointed – I was happy that I received an USB stick for participating and left the contest behind me.
But of course I wanted to know which cool add-ins won, so I visited the website from time to time. Yesterday I saw the winners were announced. The projects of the participants that didn’t win (including me) were listed on the site as well, but without a description, just with a download link. Interested in the other add-ins I wrote a mail to the organizers suggesting to add description texts as I didn’t feel like downloading all add-ins just to find out what they are doing. And out of curiosity I asked what had happened to the third place in the add-in category, suspecting some sort of mixup during the authoring of the page.
Well, some time later I received a mail telling me that one of the first three contestants was “no longer eligible” and that the next of the runner-ups moved up on third place – and that was me! Wow, what a surprise… An hour later the website was updated, with GhostDoc now on third place. Unfortunately the list of the runner-ups are still without description texts, but I guess that’s coming later.
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GhostDoc meets Google Code Search
Even though it has been fixed in version 1.3.0, the infamous "Toes the string" comment generated by GhostDoc remains a running gag among long-time users. So let's use Google Code Search to see if there's somebody out there who has used (an early version of) GhostDoc to create comments without even bothering to give them a quick look: Search Now*
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*) Note that this is a live search; at the time of this writing there were indeed three results, but this may of course change in the future. -
GhostDoc wins the Audience Award at BASTA! Conference
I’m back from Mainz, where I visited the BASTA! conference. As mentioned in my previous post, my Visual Studio add-in GhostDoc was one of the ten nominees for the BASTA! .Net Award. First to fifth place were awarded by a jury – GhostDoc couldn’t score here.Then the audience was asked to raise hands for each of the ten nominees. In the end SharpDevelop and GhostDoc went head to head, getting the largest number of votes by far, with GhostDoc leading by three votes. So….
GhostDoc wins the BASTA! .NET Audience Award of 1000 EUR* !
At the time of the vote SharpDevelop had already won one of the jury’s prizes (3rd place), I guess that worked slightly in my favor. But nevertheless, receiving so many votes from the audience, devs like me, really means a lot to me. One of the other winners even came up to me and said “we’re all using GhostDoc at my company, it’s great!” – that’s nice to hear.
Updated 2006-09-21:
- This blog entry by Thomas Oppenhoff has more fotos.
- Updated in original text: 3rd place for SD
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*1000 EUR = 1268.69$ as of 2006-09-20 -
GhostDoc Nominated for BASTA! .NET Award 2006
Wow… my Visual Studio add-in GhostDoc was selected out of 32 proposals for the German .NET Award 2006 sponsored by BASTA!, dot.net magazin, msdn magazin (deutsche Ausgabe), entwickler magazin and SQLCON 2006 to be one of 10 nominees for the final round.
The nominees are, in no particular order (the linked pages are in German, sorry):
- Ralph Westphal – "one man think tank"
- Vanatec OpenAccess
- EXTRO – XML Webservice for Mobile Job Processing
- TurboDB Managed
- Sitrion iQL Studio 2006
- GhostDoc
- SharpDevelop
- Ranorex – Ein innovativer Weg GUI Applikationen zu testen
- ComfortASP.NET
- ScatterWeb .NET SDK
A total of 20000 EUR (over 25000 USD) are be won for 1st down to 6th place. Hey, with the 6th place winning 1000 EUR, I’d happily settle for that
. But the competition is tough, with some heavy-weights like SharpDevelop and ComfortASP.NET in the mix. On the other hand, I don’t have to beat them, I only have to leave 4 other nominees behind me (which I think will be tough enough).The award ceremony will be held on 20th of September as part of the BASTA! conference in Mainz. Originally I hadn’t planned to visit the conference, but as it’s not that far from Bonn, I’ll take a day off and drive to Mainz.
P.S. I’d like to thank Albert Weinert for convincing me to enter a proposal as I was feeling a bit intimidated by the premise of an award “for the best, most innovative, and most important contributions to .NET coming from Germany, Austria and Switzerland”.
Update 2006-09-15: Seems like I have to leave 5 (not 4) competitors behind me... in a mail clarifying what is happening when during the award ceremony it is mentioned that 1st to 5th place according to the judges get prizes and that one prize will be awarded by the audience (no chance for GhostDoc on that one, given the competition of e.g. SharpDevelop). Whatever; I look at the whole situation like this: I don't have to pay entry fees to the BASTA! conference for that day and I'll take what I can get in terms of interesting sessions. So even if GhostDoc doesn't make the Top 5, I still have gotten something nice from being in the Top 10.
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GhostDoc 1.9.5 Released
<summary>
GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML
documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited
from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from
name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.
</summary>This release contains minor updates of the documentation and changes regarding the text generation.
- Changed: References generated by the $(ShortName...) and the $(FullName...) macros no longer generate the "T:" prefix, as this prevented the compiler from detecting broken references to renamed classes (thanks to forum user “erwind” for pointing out various issues with the "kind of" identifiers). Note that GhostDoc currently does not remove the qualifiers from inherited documentation.
- Changed: Most generated texts now use the $(FullNameAsSee) macro, with the exception of the summary for constructors.
Download on the GhostDoc website.
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GhostDoc 1.9.4 (for Visual Studio 2005) Released
A couple of issues were found shortly after the release of version 1.9.3 yesterday, so here’s version 1.9.4 of GhostDoc for Visual Studio 2005 (download on the GhostDoc website)
- Fixed: Installation "for everyone" not working in 1.9.3 (since preview 3).
- Fixed: Configuration dialog using huge amounts of CPU time when clicking certain parts.
- Fixed: Inherited documentation in VB.Net sometimes being garbled.
Here’s my usual disclaimer: VB.Net support is regarded as "experimental", it is turned off by default and you have to turn it on in the configuration dialog.
For a list of what was new in 1.9.3 see this blog post.
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GhostDoc 1.9.3 (for Visual Studio 2005) Released
Version 1.9.3 is a bugfix release of GhostDoc for Visual Studio 2005 (download on the GhostDoc website) dealing mostly with installation problems.
- Fixed: GhostDoc not appearing in Visual Studio on systems that had Extensibility.DLL missing in the GAC (caused by uninstallation of other add-ins with buggy installers).
- Fixed: GhostDoc not working on international (i.e. non-US) versions of Visual Studio:
- Assignment of keyboard shortcuts not working on non-US versions
- "Tools" menu not found on "Chinese Simplified" systems
- Fixed: Problems with multiple users on a single machine.
- Fixed: Problems with users working under non-admin accounts (MSI installation still requires admin permissions).
- Fixed: Documentation of indexers in VB.Net (remaining known issue: VB.Net indexers are treated like C# indexers - no explicit <param> tag for the parameter, only the first parameter is mentioned)
- Changed: Summaries of VB.Net properties in interfaces now start with "Gets or sets ..." (remaining known issue: ReadOnly properties are not handled correctly, but that's not easy to correct right now)
Because of the known issues mentioned above, VB.Net support will still remain "experimental" in this release, so it is turned off by default and you have to turn it on in the configuration dialog.
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GhostDoc: Looking for International Beta Testers
I’m in the process of getting GhostDoc 1.9.3 out the door. This is mainly a bugfix release adding support for international versions of Visual Studio 2005. If you are using a different combination than
- Visual Studio 2005 (English) on any language version of Windows
- Visual Studio 2005 (German) on a German Windows version
and if you are interested in trying an installation of version 1.9.3, please send an email to
gd193beta@roland-weigelt.de, I’ll get back to you in the next days.Please include the following information in your email:
- Language of your OS
- Language of your Visual Studio 2005
Please note that the preview version sent out to testers does not contain any hot new features, so if 1.9.2 is running on your system just fine, you won’t miss anything.
Update: The new version has been released, the email address is now disabled (too much spam).
