Using Attributes for Documentation in C# [closed]

Answer 1

Some disadvantages of keeping documentation in attributes:

• poor formatting for long texts;
• no support by Visual Studio add-ons (e.g. using ReSharper's documentation preview feature);
• no support by 3rd party documentation generation tools;
• inclusion of documentation in assemblies which significantly eases reverse engineering;
• duplication of metadata in source codes with metadata stored in a version control system (there's no point in tracking any declaration's author and version in the source code, when the VCS gives you much more precise information — VCS's don't lie).

I can't think of any advantage right now. In case I would really need it, it's always possible to parse the XML documentation comments and transform the whole codebase into any attributed form.

Answer 2

Just to mention it for the sake of completeness, in the Testing Projects you could do:

[TestProperty(“Author”, “Ducky”)] 
public void SomeTest()
{
       ...
} 

You could extend that approach for regular code. I rather not comment on theoretical issues. That said, perhaps script that uses repository to extract all the "authors"/"editors" of the specific file/class/method can be created.

Answer 3

The question here seems to be 'what is documentation?'. If the 'stuff' your interested in needs to be accessible by reflection then your implied solution of attributes is a solution. But if the intent is to use standard documentation tools to build documentation then not so.

The need here begs the solution. What is the need for the 'documentation'. Perhaps the wrong question?