Archives

Archives / 2005 / July

  • GhostDoc 1.3.0 Beta 1 Released

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    I’m pleased to announce that beta 1 of GhostDoc 1.3.0 has been released. A big “Thank You” to the steadily growing number of testers who helped me testing a couple of preview builds, pointed out a few minor issues and gave me an overall “Thumbs up”.

    What’s New 

    • New: New rules for using "inherited" documentation, including base class members and members of implemented interfaces. The inherited documentation will be cleaned from single <para> tags and the texts will be tweaked (e.g. when the summar for an interface method starts with "When implemented by a class....", and the summary is inherited by the method that is an implementation).
    • New: GhostDoc updates existing documentation. Empty tags (<summary>, <returns>, <param>) will be filled according to the generation rules, existing text remains unchanged. The update reorders the parameter documentation if the order of the parameter changes, and removes documentation for parameters that no longer exist.
    • New: User defined ("custom") rules using e.g. regular expressions for matching names and/or types.
    • New: New rule for "On..." methods -- no more "Ons the click" ;-)
    • New: Rule for static constructors.
    • New: Rule for the Finalize method (descructor syntax in C#).
    • New: Rule for event handler methods as they are created by the WinForms designer.
    • New: Rule for boolean properties.
    • New: Rules (both custom and built-in) can now be customized by editing templates that are used by the text generation rules.
    • New: Export of partial configurations is now possible (e.g. for exporting only a single custom rule).

    What’s Missing

    There are a couple of small features I’d like to see in 1.3.0 final. And then there’s a huge update of the help file waiting to be done.

    FAQ

    • When is the final coming out?
      My personal deadline is end of August. 
    • What about VS2005 support?
      I guess i’ll wait for the PDC bits of VS2005

  • GhostDoc: Looking for Testers

    1 Comment

    I’m planning a first public beta of GhostDoc 1.3.0 towards the end of July. A couple of private builds have already been released to colleagues and people on the net who offered their help. So far feedback has been pretty good. People like the new features, some issues have been found, most of them could be fixed in the following builds.

    Now I would like to have a couple more people to test the current build. If you’re interested, contact me via the contact form. Please tell me about your system (e.g. which other Add-ins are installed), since when you have been using GhostDoc and how often you use it. I’ll then send you an email with the download link (when waiting for a reply, please take time zone differences into account ;-).

    Here are the new features you can try out in the preview:

    • New rules for using "inherited" documentation, including base class members and members of implemented interfaces. The inherited documentation will be cleaned from single <para> tags and the texts will be tweaked (e.g. when the summary for an interface method starts with "When implemented by a class....", and the summary is inherited by the method that is actually the implementation).
    • GhostDoc now updates existing documentation. Empty tags (<summary>, <returns>, <param>) will be filled according to the generation rules, existing text remains unchanged. The update reorders the parameter documentation if the order of the parameter changes, and removes documentation for parameters that no longer exist.
    • User defined ("custom") rules using e.g. regular expressions for matching names and/or types.
    • New rule for "On..." methods -- no more "Ons the click" ;-)
    • Rule for static constructors.
    • Rule for the Finalize method (destructor syntax in C#).
    • Rule for event handler methods as they are created by the WinForms designer.
    • Rule for boolean properties.
    • Rules (both custom and built-in) can now be customized by editing templates that are used by the text generation rules.

    A few words about the quality of this preview: Answering the obvious question “does it fry my data and/or my Visual Studio installation?”, I can say that the Visual Studio integration and installation/uninstallation are at least as good as in version 1.2.1, so I wouldn’t hesitate to run the setup on production machines. The current problems are mostly missing features, some usability issues and the online help that hasn’t been updated yet.

  • Two Years of Blogging

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    Oops, so I missed my blog’s anniversary (by a day). My first entry was on July, 2nd 2003 and it’s incredible how fast the time has passed. A lot has happened since the last anniversary – most of it could be summarized into one word: GhostDoc. After my articles about Visual Inheritance, this little add-in has put me high up on Google. Right now I’m still working on version 1.3.0 which is pretty late as I’m not working on it in the same frantic pace as for 1.0.0 (which got ready 11 minutes before the deadline).

    But this year hasn’t been only about GhostDoc. Other blog posts – besides the occasional rant – included:

    Let's see what the next year brings…

  • PDC 05: I'll be there / GhostDoc goes Redmond

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    YES! It’s official! I’ll be at the PDC in L.A., together with two other colleagues from the infonea product development team at Comma Soft AG. As flying from Germany to the West Coast of the USA is nothing I do on a weekly basis, I’ll take the opportunity to finally claim one of the prizes I won for GhostDoc in Roy Osherove’s add-in contest in August 2004 – a tour of MS offices in Redmond (which didn’t include transportation to Redmond ;-). I asked Josh Ledgard whether I could bring my colleagues, he replied “no problem”, so we’ll all take a little detour on our way to L.A. and visit the campus on Friday, 9th. before continuing our journey to L.A. on Saturday.