Before I get into talking about Microsoft HTML Help or any alternatives, let me ask you something. Have you ever had the singularly frustrating experience of staring blankly at the Google homepage? You’re staring because blankly because it occurs to you that you don’t even know what words to type. Maybe this happens because you’re…
Though I’ll talk today about .NET code documentation, I want to start further back than that. And by “that,” I mean further back than .NET. I realize that may date me somewhat, but please bear with me. Most things in the programming world date back further than you’d think. For a dramatic example of this,…
More than a decade ago, I worked somewhere that would ship CDs containing commercial software. Along with others, I’d program applications that ran commercial mail sorting machines and provided a user interface for the operators. To update or patch the software, we’d cut official CDs and send them out in the mail. These CDs would,…
If you didn’t know that C# spell check was a thing, it is. For one thing, you can run a normal spelling analysis on any comments in your code. That shouldn’t surprise. But you can also check the code itself for spelling errors. That may seem like a strange thing at first. Wouldn’t a C#…
The latest beta of GhostDoc introduces a new feature that makes XML documentation authoring a breeze: visual editing for XML comments. The number one challenge authoring XML comments, according to our users, has been keeping the valid XML that includes encoding HTML formatting tags, code samples, etc. Many of these don’t even show up until…
For the last several years, I’ve made more and more of my living via entrepreneurial pursuits. I started my career as a software developer and then worked my way along that career path before leaving fulltime employment to do my own thing. These days, I consult, but I also make training content, write books, and…
If you haven’t lived in a techie cave the last 10 years, you’ve probably noticed JavaScript’s rise to prominence. Actually, forget prominence. JavaScript has risen to command consideration as today’s lingua franca of modern software development. I find it sort of surreal to contemplate that, given my own backstory. Years (okay, almost 2 decades) ago,…
We are looking for your input and we’re willing to bribe you for answering one very simple question: What are your biggest code documentation challenges right now? The survey is super-quick and we’re offering a $20 discount code for your time (good with any new SubMain product license purchase) that you will automatically receive once…
If you spend enough years writing software, sooner or later, your chosen vocation will force you into reverse engineering. Some weird API method with an inscrutable name will stymie you. And you’ll have to plug in random inputs and examine the outputs to figure out what it does. Clearly, this wastes your time. Even if…
Before I get down to the brass tacks of how to do some interesting stuff, I’m going to spin a tale of woe. Well, I might have phrased that a little strongly. Call it a tale of corporate drudgery. In any case, many years ago I worked briefly in a little department, at a little…
