Hyperlink your source code

re: Hyperlink your source code

mike johnson — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 07:48:04 GMT

primitive. really primitive. honestly? I think MS missed a huge and I do mean huge opportunity when it introduced C# to not have the source actually be code markup that was readered into source code. something like xml or html for source code

you could have embedded images/diagrams in the markup - no more tab damaged ascii art. xslt to control formatting of code. comments with bold, paramters appearing in blue, italics or whatever style you chose. refactoring would be dog simple since things like <forloop></forloop> would have controlled code constructs etc.

sigh.

code visualization would be cool. just render symbols based on the elemnts. branch/condition/loops. Visual Studio could have been so much more.

re: Hyperlink your source code

The Janitor — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 09:37:13 GMT

Nice thought, but the way is wrong: C# already supports structured commenting through XML comments: The <see> tag actually links to other types and members. One should utilize this already given feature instead of doing something totally new and different.

ReSharper, e.g., supports this through its "Quick Documentation" (Ctrl+Q) where it displays a type's/member's XML docs in a formatted and hyperlinked tooltip window.

See: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/coding_assistance.html

Un Addin pour ajouter des liens dans vos commentaires

Blog-a-Styx — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:41:13 GMT

Le titre pourrait laisser penser que je ne connais pas la doc xml déjà proposée par C# , qui permet,

re: Hyperlink your source code

Doug — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:43:05 GMT

The ultimate would have the text formatting power of Donald Knuth's literate programming tools but integrated live into Visual Studio and for languages used in production.

re: Hyperlink your source code

Timothy Khouri — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:47:08 GMT

That's beautiful! I love to see developers trying to standardize their tools so as to help the community.

As for the above comment about C# should be XML... that's nasty and bizarre. Besides, if someone was so impressed with XSLT, why not build a tool that will do the transformations yourself?

C# is perfect :)

re: Hyperlink your source code

Bruce Li — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:25:06 GMT

sounds very cool, thanks for sharing.

re: Hyperlink your source code

skware — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 18:44:41 GMT

um, I don't get it.

/// <summary>blah blah blah<see cref="SomeOtherMethod"> </summary>

re: Hyperlink your source code

Jon Davis — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:33:53 GMT

Why are you reinventing the wheel on this? The XML documentation in C# (along with Sandcastle) covers these bases quite well (see "see", etc). It irritates me greatly when I download source code from somebody who rolls their own documentation scheme rather than uses the built-in documentation functionality. If we really want to find the referenced bits while coding, we can right-click and choose Go To Definition or Find All References. Outside of the editor, we have Reflector and Sandcastle. I'm not sure what more you need, but rolling yet another mechanism doesn't help anyone.

But I may be missing something. I tend to be critical of things that I find curiously interesting. I'll check it out.

re: Hyperlink your source code

Antony — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 04:14:22 GMT

It is only working for the same class methods which resides in the same source file. Am I missing something?

Following is the coding I used...

In Class2.cs

public class Class2

{

public Class2()

{

// TODO: Add constructor logic here

}

public void comments()

{

}

In Class1

public class Class1

{

/// <summary>

/// code:Class2::comments blah blah

/// </summary>

public Class1()

{

}

But above link is not navigating to the Class2 method

re: Hyperlink your source code

J. Daniel Smith — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:18:44 GMT

I think C# as XML would have been REALLY neat too. It would have made all kinds of things much easier.

re: Hyperlink your source code

Hank Lynch — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 20:00:17 GMT

Code as xml....sounds a bit like XAML, no?

re: Hyperlink your source code

Keith Patrick — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 23:26:39 GMT

XAML is more of serialization format than a procedural language. XML's good for representing the the state of something and defining general workflows, but the general C syntax isn't going away any time soon. On the other hand, I tend to think that XML would make a good replacement for, say, Verilog in that you want to represent a static object (a chip) in a self-describing format with tons of parsers, transforms, and "compilation" in the form of deserialization.

But on the topic of the hyperlinked code, I'm in the camp of "doesn't C# already have XML documentation for this?"