GhostDoc 1.1.0 released

A new version of GhostDoc, the winner of Roy Osherove's Visual Studio add-in contest, is available - finally! Some bugfixes, some new features, an all-new help file, some eye-candy... but the most important work was done on turning a contest entry (with some corners cut to meet the deadline) into a stable foundation for the coming versions. To have this whole thing manageable, I pretty early on decided to push most of my ideas and the feature requests of users to version 1.2.0 -- looking back, a wise decision as finishing 1.1.0 turned out to be pretty painful.

Download: on the GhostDoc homepage (Edit 2004-08-31: removed link to a specific version)

First Steps

  • Install the MSI
  • Start Visual Studio to complete the setup

After installation, the Windows start menu contains a sub-menu "Programs -> Weigelt -> GhostDoc" with shortcuts to the help file and the demo project.

If you hate reading manuals, you should at least take a look at "How do I see some action without reading boring stuff?" -- the link to that topic is on the start page of the help file ;-) 

What's New:

  • Added: Configuration dialog for acronyms and words involved in reordering operations happening when sentences are generated from identifier names (e.g. "of the", "no the" words).
  • Added: Import/Export of settings (on the configuration dialog).
  • Added: Help file and help in dialogs.
  • Changed: The "of the" reordering now checks for certain adjectives affecting "of the" trigger words and takes them into account while reordering.
    Example: If "size" is configured as an "of the" trigger word and "initial" as an adjective, then "initialPageBufferSize" will be translated to "initial size of the page buffer" instead of "size of the initial page buffer" (as in Version 1.0x). In contrast, "primaryPageBufferSize" will still be translated to "size of the primary page buffer" (because "primary" is not on the list).
  • Changed: The rule for method names consisting of only one word now checks for parameters and adjusts the generated doc comment accordingly ("<Verb> this instance." for methods without parameters, "<Verb> the specified <first param text>." of methods with parameters.).
  • Fixed: Bug in the automatic detection of acronyms -- words consisting of consonants and only one vowel at the start of the word (e.g. "Add") were classified as acronyms.
  • Fixed: Bug in the handling of all-uppercase words in identifiers -- the words (e.g. ID) were split into single characters.
  • Fixed: Bug when documenting properties in interfaces -- XML documentation comment didn't appear (reason was a fat bug in Visual Studio's CodeDOM; I'll have to check whether this still exists in VS2005 as soon as I get the copy I ordered at Microsoft).

2 Comments

  • In the day or so that I had GhostDoc installed, Visual Studio.net completely crashed several times. The only thing I could think of that changed was that I installed GhostDoc...so I uninstalled it. The crashes then mysteriously stopped. This is on my machine at work, so I don't have time to install it and try and figure out conditions to reproduce right now, but hopefully other people with the problem will post. If I can reproduce it later, I will be sure to let you know because the add-in is a great idea.

  • Hmm... this is the first report of a problem like this, but to be honest, when working with VS.Net extensibility, nothing should come as a surprise.

    Do you have any other add-ins installed? Any kind of hint would be helpful for me.

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