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GhostDoc News
Development of GhostDoc is moving slowly, but steadily towards version 1.3.0, which will be the first release since October (wow, incredible how time flies by). So what has happened since the last GhostDoc News on this blog back in January? Looking from the outside, not much. If you remember the screenshot published back then, “all I did” was add the rule configuration tree to the configuration dialog and make all the buttons work:
Editing the settings of a rule looks something like this:
Behind the scenes, things have been far more complicated and time-consuming than expected. But the good news is that editing/exporting/importing the configuration (of rules and everything else) is pretty much finished.
So what’s the big deal about moving some configuration data around? I won’t go too much into detail, but simply imagine two computers A and B runnning GhostDoc (e.g. at home and at work) and you change some settings of a rule on A, change the priority of another (or maybe the same) rule on B. Then add some rules on A, remove some rules on B, and of course all these changes happened days after the last time you synced both computers. There are many opportunities to fry the user’s configuration data and while a fully automatic synchronization simply wasn’t possible, even just asking the user what to do (and then frying his/her data — nah, just kidding) already took a huge effort.
So what are the next steps? I’ll now write new text generation rules to solve some of the most often reported issues (e.g. “On…” methods) and the user defined rules mentioned in the January post. That will be pretty much the feature set for 1.3.0. Other ideas I have been playing around with will have to wait until 1.4.0 or later.
Visual Studio Beta 2
As people have been asking: Yes, I’ll look into releasing a version of 1.3.0 for Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2. There will not be a port of 1.2.1, though.
Other News
- I saw that GhostDoc is mentioned on the Microsoft Visual C# Developer Center — nice.
- There’s a new section on the GhostDoc home page, the “GhostDoc Hall of Shame” showing some of the more obscure results of the text generation. If you have weird/funny/sad/unexpected results, don’t hesitate to drop me a line.
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My Copy of "Visual Studio Hacks" Has Arrived
I’ve received my free copy of Visual Studio Hacks by James Avery which I got for contributing hack #69 “Create comments faster” (page 280 – 285). These pages contain an introduction to – you may have guessed it – GhostDoc. After reading my part (of course ;-) I took a quick look at the rest of the book and I must say the first impression is really good. Obviously, after reading only a few pages, it’s too early for me to give a final verdict, so I’ll leave that for a later blog post.
A nice surprise for me is that my original text wasn’t edited that much (I wasn’t really sure what to expect, as English isn’t my primary language).
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A GhostDoc Feature I Will Not Implement
I’ve received a number of requests for a new GhostDoc feature for documenting a whole source file at once. This feature is filed as item #45 in my issue tracking system, and its status is “rejected”.
The texts generated by GhostDoc are suggestions generated by some stupid code that breaks identifiers into separate words and juggles them around. Each and every text generated by GhostDoc has to be checked by the developer, and should be revised by the developer if necessary. Depending on your coding style, the time required for checking and revising the generated text usually is less than writing everything from scratch, i.e. using GhostDoc saves you time.
So that’s the idea: GhostDoc guesses some documentation text, you check the results, and in the end you’ve saved some time.
I’m pretty sure that many of us know at least one “motivationally challenged” developer who is very likely to skip the part where you actually have to use your own brain. If such a person has to document a class member by member, there’s at least a little chance that he/she will notice texts that are just too stupid (e.g. such classics like “Toes the string.” and “Ons the click”). But can you imagine the same person given the feature of running GhostDoc on a whole source file at once? DailyWTF, anyone?
