Does Visual Studio have the ability to generate html documentation for Javadoc-style comments?

Question

Is there any way in Visual Studio to generate HTML documentation for Javadoc-style comments? If so, what steps are needed for this?

BlueJ has the ability to translate Javadoc-style comments into an html file.

As the following illustration shows for Java using BlueJ, I want to do the same with Visual Studio:
_{(source: time-tripper.com )}

Answer 1

Do you really mean JavaDoc in Java? If so, I don't believe it, just use the Javadoc itself. Visual Studio does not actually support Java.

If you mean comments on the C # XML documentation, then you can change the project properties to create an XML file and then use NDoc (terminated) or Sandcastle to build HTML (or chm, etc.). Admittedly, this is not as easy as it could be.

EDIT: If you are using C ++, you should probably take a look at Doxygen . There may be Visual Studio plugins, but you are best off running Doxygen during the build process. If you use C ++ / CLI, there might be some equivalent to C # XML comments, but I don't know about that.

Answer 2

You can use the Javadoc compatible comment style, either enter comments manually or use my addin, Atomineer Pro Documentation , to take most of the work out of it. Then, to create external documentation, use doxygen , which happily reads javadoc.

An alternative (as John said) is to use XmlDoc format comments that Visual Studio can use (for intellisense tooltips), Atomineer, Sandcastle, and Doxygen. This is a less human-readable format, but gives you significant advantages in the Visual Studio environment, so it is a bit more flexible.

Both approaches will work for C #, C ++, C (although C # works better on the intellisense side)