General
- Works as an add-in into MS Visual Basic 6.0.
- Ready to generate technical documentation for your existing VB projects in few seconds.
- Automatically creates table of contents, index, topics, cross-references and context sensitive help .
- Automatically creates all interesting links such as Applies To, Methods, Properties, Events, Examples.
- Allows to add description of methods, arguments, etc. automatically by extracting it from the source code comment from special tags (similar to JavaDoc system). These comments are not required.See benefits.
- VBdocman can add comments automatically just by two mouse clicks. In addition, it provides sophisticated user-friendly comment editor.
- Support for project groups.
Documentation formats
- HTML Help (*.chm file which looks like MSDN)
- WinHelp (*.hlp file)
- HTML files (with Java index and table of contents)
- RTF document, suitable for printing
- XML which can be for example processed later by other tools
- Others. The user is allowed to define his own format for any ASCII based document such as LATEX, custom HTML and others.
Information that can be included in documentation
- See Also links
- Examples links
- Object, form, method, property, event, variable or constant description
- Parameters description
- Settings description
- Return value
- Remarks
- Author
- Version
- Revision
- Source code
- Declaration
- Scope
- Images and links
- User defined information (e.g. copyright, to do, message to other team members, ...)
Benefits of using VBdocman comments
- Consistency. If something was added to the code e.g. a new method, it is automatically reflected in newly generated documentation. In the traditional way of writing documentation, many links (See Also, Methods, ...) should be updated manually and it is very likely that something will be forgotten or mistaken.
- Documentation in various formats can be generated by a few mouse clicks and you have documentation in all supported formats in a few minutes. It would not be possible if documentation was written for example in RTF and user would want to have it in CHM then.
- Efficient communication within the team, especially when Source Safe is used. Every programmer comments his part of the code. Everybody in the team can then make documentation and easily use or modify that code and get on-line help.
- The source code is precisely commented and looks nice.