XML Comments are powerful for code documentation. The strict nature of the XML makes it much too easy to break the formatting, and miss the required escaping for symbols.
Have you ever generated help documentation from comments, only to find that the end result is poorly formatted? Text running awkwardly onto separate lines, or garbled text caused by an omitted escape character? It's a frustrating, time-consuming experience to regenerate it until it looks right.
As software developers, we deal with that enough, compiling and running applications only to see that some GUI component is out of whack.
To avoid that frustration, GhostDoc allows you to edit documentation in WYSIWYG fashion, with the changes persisted back to the XML documentation in your code.
GhostDoc has saved me countless hours of documentation that permits me more time to spend with my family!
In addition to developers having document previews we can generate a compiled help file as part of the build process to meet our documentation requirements (all maintained in code – no separate process).
And I have to say, GhostDoc is an awesome product complemented by awesome support!
I love GhostDoc, consider this tool essential for professional .NET development, thank you!
GhostDoc helped me learn how to use the various tags so that my XML documentation is better than it used to be. Most developers are like I was and don't know about anything other than the
<summary>and<param>tags.
GhostDoc is an invaluable tool in getting the bare bones comments added to the source code. When GhostDoc generates a useful description of the function it is also an indication of quality of the function name!
You want API documentation for your code, but it's labor-intensive. Really labor-intensive. Even once you learn the "triple-slash" keyboard shortcut, filling in all of the fields for each method and class you create is time-consuming.
So let GhostDoc do it for you, with a single keystroke Ctrl-Shift-D
Have you ever made changes to a method and forgotten to update the method's XML documentation? It's one of the biggest pain points with in-file documentation of the evolving source code.
GhostDoc's "Documentation Maintenance" detects code changes that affect documentation, and produces updates accordingly.
Has documentation historically been a source of manual labor, and something that you have to remember to do as an afterthought? Commit the code, let the build produce a candidate release, test it, verify it, and get ready to ship... and, oh, right! The documentation!
We do everything from the build these days. Let GhostDoc make generating documentation just another part of a healthy build process.
