Auto generate function documentation in Visual Studio

Question

I was wondering if there is a way (hopefully keyboard shortcut) to create auto generate function headers in visual studio.

Example:

Private Function          


        

Answer 1

Visual Assist has a nice solution too, and is highly costumizable.

After tweaking it to generate doxygen-style comments, these two clicks would produce -

/**
* Method:    FindTheFoo
* FullName:  FindTheFoo
* Access:    private 
* Qualifier:
* @param    int numberOfFoos
* @return   bool
*/
private bool FindTheFoo(int numberOfFoos)
{

}

(Under default settings, its a bit different.)

---

Edit: The way to customize the 'document method' text is under VassistX->Visual Assist Options->Suggestions, select 'Edit VA Snippets', Language: C++, Type: Refactoring, then go to 'Document Method' and customize. The above example is generated by:

Answer 2

GhostDoc!

Right-click on the function, select "Document this" and

private bool FindTheFoo(int numberOfFoos)

becomes

/// <summary>
/// Finds the foo.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="numberOfFoos">The number of foos.</param>
/// <returns></returns>
private bool FindTheFoo(int numberOfFoos)

(yes, it is all autogenerated).

It has support for C#, VB.NET and C/C++. It is per default mapped to Ctrl+Shift+D.

Remember: you should add information beyond the method signature to the documentation. Don't just stop with the autogenerated documentation. The value of a tool like this is that it automatically generates the documentation that can be extracted from the method signature, so any information you add should be new information.

That being said, I personally prefer when methods are totally selfdocumenting, but sometimes you will have coding-standards that mandate outside documentation, and then a tool like this will save you a lot of braindead typing.