Today, a user of our VSdocman has asked me for interesting functionality in Visual Studio. He wants to collapse all XML comments in the file with one click. There is no such command in VS so I wrote a macro that does the job. The macro only works in VS 2005 and higher and only for C# and VB .NET code.
In fact, there are two macros, one for collapsing the comments and one for toggling the comment outlining expansion. The first one seems to be better for our purposes. But due to limitations of VS automation, it has one drawback. When you manually collapse this comment
Carlos Quintero of MZ-Tools has started his blog subtitled as Visual Studio Extensibility: macros, add-ins, SDK packages. You may already know Carlos from several newsgroups related to VS extensibility
microsoft.public.vstudio.extensibility
microsoft.public.vsnet.ide
MSDN: Visual Studio Extensibility.
Or from vsnetaddin group which discusses how to write Visual Studio.NET add-ins, wizards, and macros using the IDE automation model and VSIP interfaces.
Or you have seen his great set of articles for add-in developers on his site.
And of course, almost every VS user knows his MZ-Tools add-in.
It's finally here. Long awaited SP1 for Visual Studio .NET 2003 has been released.
You can get it here. The package has 156 MB, the download was fast and installation smooth. You need to insert original VS .NEt 2003 installation CDs during setup which took about 15 minutes on my machine.
Microsoft has fixed many bugs and annoyances in this SP1 but not all. There's one that I hate the most - as I'm add-in developer. And SP1 doesn't fix it. This bug applies to most add-ins including our VSdocman. When you unload the add-in, it is immediatelly automatically reloaded. You need to close VS to close the add-in. See this Carlos J. Quintero's article for more details.
Anyway, the release of SP1 is good news for all of us.
We have some great news here at Helixoft. We have reworked our VBdocman .NET and named it VSdocman 3.0. Why the name change? It's because VSdocman supports not only VB .NET but also C# now. VSdocman is Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003/2005 add-in for the quick commenting and automatic generation of class documentation from your VB .NET and C# source code files. You can take advantage of its WYSIWYG comment editor, multiple and localizable output formats - HTML, CHM, Help2, RTF, XML (including new MSDN2 look), command line tool for easy registering of Help2 on your customer's computer and many more. Besides standard XML comment tags, you can use extended set of tags for formatting the text, inserting tables or pictures. Your C# or VB .NET Win Form, Smart Device or ASP .NET project deserves professional documentation. You can download the beta version 3.0 (3.5 MB) from http://www.helixoft.com/net/vsdocman_3_0beta.zip This new version introduces many great features. You can send your feedback about this beta version to
