Resharper Can Preview XML Comments as HTML

Golly gee whiz but you learn something new every day. I was a big fan of Quickdoc viewer as a means to quickly view an HTML rendering of your XML comments directly from within VS.NET.

The reason I say was is that I cannot for the life of me get that sucker to work in VS.NET 2005 on my machine. I am also having problems with GhostDoc. It seems any plugin that uses the new XML file based registration (instead of the registry) doesn’t work for me. Perhaps because I am running as a LUA?

In any case, I just noticed that Resharper has a similar feature, though not nearly as nice as Quickdoc. If you select a method or class and hit CTRL+Q, it will show a window with a more readable version of your XML comments. The following image demonstrates the feature.

I am very happy to find this, but only because I can’t get QuickDoc to work. Quickdoc is far better in how it renders the documentation in pretty much the same way that NDoc does. Maybe I should the Jetbrains folk with a feature request to improve this a tad bit.

What others have said

Requesting Gravatar... Jim Holmes Jul 20, 2006 3:40 AM
# re: Resharper Can Preview XML Comments as HTML
Travis Illig's CR_Documentor does a nice job in this arena, too, but you need DxCore installed to use the widget.

Travis's tool is here (http://www.paraesthesia.com/blog/comments.php?id=701_0_1_0_C) and I wrote a blurb about it here (http://visualstudiohacks.com/CRDocumentor).

The DxCore thing may be a show-stopper for many. It's "free" but has got a pretty restrictive license on where you can use it -- unless you buy one of the other DevExpress products.
Requesting Gravatar... Jason Kemp Jul 20, 2006 7:19 AM
# re: Resharper Can Preview XML Comments as HTML
Resharper's QuickDoc feature also works on any method or property. Hit Ctrl-Q over a property from the framework (like, say, Uri.OriginalString) in your code and voila! Documentation!
Requesting Gravatar... Travis Illig Jul 20, 2006 8:40 AM
# Looks Like Jim Beat Me To It
I was going to mention trying CR_Documentor, but it looks like Jim beat me to it. :) (Though I will mention CR_Documentor adds other stuff beyond just doc preview, like a context menu that, among other things, allows you to select part of your comment and XML encode it - handy for code snippets you want to place as examples.)

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