GhostDoc News

As mentioned on the GhostDoc homepage (which I use for the smaller status reports that also contain more private stuff), I’m back working on version 1.3.0. Since Christmas I have managed to spend a good amount of time on GhostDoc, but things are not progressing as fast as I had hoped. There are a couple of tough problems to solve that come with one of the major goals for 1.3.0: User-defined rules.

In addition to user-customizable rules as mentioned in a previous post, it will be possible to define new rules by specifying regular expressions for matching e.g. method signatures, and templates containing macros for generating documentation texts. This may not be as flexible as writing new rules in C# code (which will have to wait until the framework has been stabilized), but there’s a lot that can be done with this simple solution.

Things like upgrading from earlier versions (without losing customizations) and synchronizing configuration files between installations e.g. at home and at work turn out to be pretty tricky even though these topics already have been addressed in previous versions. Right now I’m busy refactoring and extending the code for reading/writing/importing/upgrading/merging configuration files, and hey — my existing unit tests actually caught a couple of nasty bugs and thus saved me a lot of time!

To finish this post, here’s a screenshot showing the rule configuration tree (no new rules shown here, though):

20050105_GhostDocRuleTree

I’m far away from any release, which in turn is a chance for your suggestions and feature requests to be included in 1.3.0. Simply drop me a line in an email (ghostdoc at roland-weigelt.de).

 

5 Comments

  • It would be nice if ghost doc supported automatic region generation. For example all of the constructors could go into "Construction and initialization" region. Each field with a property which accesses the field could get its own region with the name of the region being the same as the name of the property. This should make code navigation easier, as well as help developer to structure code better.

  • It doesn't seem to me that a feature to automatically generate regions quite fits GhostDoc. There are plenty of other addins and macros freely available which are very good at automatically generating regions, albeit they aren't as smart as what Slava's looking for. I for one use the surround with region feature in ReSharper. Although simplistic, it saves me a ton of time.

  • Hi Jason



    > It doesn't seem to me that a feature to automatically generate regions quite fits GhostDoc.



    At the moment: No. That's why I won't spend time in the near future on implementing it for the next version(s) -- there's just so much to do in the area of GhostDoc's *current* core competency.



    On the other hand: While I haven't looked into Resharper yet. the other region creation macros I've tried so far treated the source code as plain text and didn't explore the possibilities of looking at the CodeDOM. Note that I have no idea whether this would actually lead to something useful or not. But then GhostDoc started out as a wild experiment as well...

  • PPS! Ok - one more feature request: documentation of public events.

  • PPPS! And to dare venture outside the scope of XML comments, possibly the ability to add Description and Category attributes to public properties and events?

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