XML Comments in VB: PowerToys and "the others"
Microsoft has released some PowerToys for Visual Studio.NET 2003, including a tool that enables XML comments in Visual Basic.NET: VB Commenter. XML comments were available for C# developers since VS.NET 2002, and I still do not understand why they did not implement them in VB. But anyway, the great (open source) community of (VB).NET, has produced several tools to enable XML comments in VB:
- VB.DOC (open source, I contributed to a little bit too)
- XML Comments Creator by Fesersoft (not open source but a free version is available)
- VBXC
But now Microsoft has it's own tool, so should we all use it, instead of these mentioned above? I think not yet. Some features are not implemented yet in VB Commenter, like using HTML tags in your comments, MS told us they are planning to improve this tool. It's a pitty for the 3rd party tools, but I hope MS will succeed and make VB Commenter are very complete tool, until they add XML comments to VB nativly.
BTW, if you keep asking yourself "Why do I have to use XML comments in my code? Only to have Intellisense when other developers my components?", I suggest you take a look at NDoc. This open source tool, lets you create helpfiles based on your XML comments. So a big part of your documentation can be generated, what is pretty cool since most developers, don't like to write (or even worse: update) documentation. MS has a tool for doing this in the PowerToys collection: Custom Help Builder, but I haven't tried it out, yet.