private override

2 amazazing productivity tools

I'm in the middle of writing a bunch of XML API documentation for a prototype I just built.  I'm not really a fan of xml doc-comments, which is why I didn't do it in the first place, but the client wants API documentation, so this is definitely the best way to get it.  The two aforementioned tools?

• GhostDoc
• Docu

GhostDoc

GhostDoc basically infers the documentation from the name of the method and its parameter signature.  Absolutely brilliant.  Hook this baby up with a keyboard shortcut, and blam!, it just spits out documentation with a keystroke (which of course is easy to tweak once it's there).  One of the  awesome features is that for implemented methods of an interface, it'll use the exact documentation from the doc-comments from the interface file.  Sweet.

Docu

Docu is sort of like the NDoc of old.  I know that SandCastle exists, but this is so much simpler.  It uses the Spark view engine/templating system, so that means the output is completely customizable.  Right now it comes with a single template, that is heavily inspired by rdoc rather than something like MSDN style (though I'm certain an MSDN style template will be contributed to the project soon).  The project is really young, but it is used already by FluentNHibernate (and was the reason for its inception, really).  Here is the output for the FluentNH project: FluentNH API Docs.

Amazazing.