Comment Helper 1.2

Comment Helper is a free add-in DLL for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2005 which automates the process of commenting C++ source code.

We all should know that documentation is a necessity. It helps others to understand the code written so that debugging or maintenance can be more easily accomplished. We all also use the excuse that there is no time right now so the documentation will be done later. There are others that are not quite sure what to document and how. There may even be some who document their code but cant understand the comments later. Comment Helper is designed and created to help make it as easy as possible to create and maintain documentation and at the same time ensure that it is consistent. This add-in for the Microsoft Visual Studio Integrated Development Environment aids the C++ programmer in commenting source code in both header files and source files. It makes use of text files as templates for comment blocks in code.

Comment Helper makes this possible by using the Microsoft Automation Model and a set of comment template files to insert comments in code to document VC Code Model code elements. Information is then extracted from the IDE and used to populate the comment blocks after insertion into the document. See Table 1for a list of information relevant and extracted and key strings in the comment blocks used to place the information into.

An additional objective and feature is that the comments inserted can then be used to generate HTML documentation. The syntax of the comments can be made recognizable and usable by external applications such as CppDoc or Doxygen. These applications can then automatically generate a set of HTML files from these comments in C++ header and source files. The syntax used in the default templates delivered with Comment Helper is the syntax recognized by CppDoc. The template files can be edited or different template files can be assigned for use with Doxygen or some other application.