Handbook Note 23/113: XDoc Template for Help Insight

Note 23 of 113 of Delphi 2007 Handbook

Note 23: See http://blogs.codegear.com/pawelglowacki/archive/2007/01/30/31591.aspx.

This is a link to Pawel Glowacki's XDoc Live Template, mentioned at page 48. The relevance of this live template, that helps writing comments like

/// <summary>|comment|</summary>

is that those comments are "magically" surfaced in the Help Insight window. You don't even need to compile the program to see them. For example, you can let users of a class you wrote see method descriptions as they select the method using Code Completion... I hope CodeGear and third-parties fully embrace this feature, as it would make writing Delphi code a much better experience.

This blog post is part of my "113 Delphi 2007 Handbook Notes" blogging project, to promote my new Delphi book.

I tried to make XML comments writing more easily in my expert, Code Beautifier Collection 5.3.3 for Delphi 2006 after I wrote something for C# (if you find this interesting, test it in Delphi 2006 with Code Beautifier Collection 5.3.3 installed). However, I found the Delphi CodeDOM is quite different from C# CodeDOM because Delphi has some special language feature (I use .NET CodeDOM because my expert is written in C#). I will try to see if there is some easy way to workaround the issues and deliver this kind of cool feature in Code Beautifier Collection 6.0. You can find my expert at http://code.google.com/p/lextudio BTW, I guess this feature can be easily implemented by Object Pascal based experts such as Castalia and MMX because they contain Pascal parsers. Using a parser can do a lot more stuffs than using CodeDOM.

Marco Tech Blog

Handbook Note 23/113: XDoc Template for Help Insight

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Handbook Note 23/113 XDoc Template for Help Insight

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