For the last month, I was working on an imagery infrastructure library. Some of my effort was to well document each class, method and property so that the users of this library will have the privilege of knowing how to properly use it. During the development phase, I created a test project so I will be able to test my code at runtime. By the end of this month, I decided to separate the test project from the main solution and create a test solution. Surprisingly, when browsing the test code and hovering my library classes and methods, no comments appeared in the Visual Studio tooltip:

Those comments did appear when the test and the imagery infrastructure projects belonged to the same solution. On In this article, I am going to explain why it is so important to generate XML documentation file for each one of your .Net projects.

How many times did you write a TODO comment in your code? How many times did you forget about this comment and met it again only some months later? It happens a lot to most of the developers who eventually tends to write their TODO missions on some papers, notepad or a ToDoList application. From what I know, most software developers are not aware of the fact that they can view all of their TODO comments in one list.

When we work on big projects, there is a need to set up a development tree (directory structure) and not just put everything in the bin\Debug or bin\Release folder. There are some “how to set up a good development tree” best practices and even a .NET development tree generator called Tree Surgeon. Some of the folders in this directory structure shall be “Resources” (set of icons and images) and “Config” (set of configuration files).

How many times did you search for a specific configuration file or a specific icon in the development tree (assuming it is a big one)? You come back to a component you wrote several years ago and can’t recall where did you locate your files. Wouldn’t it be nice if for each project, our resources and configuration files could be seen form visual studio? We would never need to find them using the windows explorer anymore and we will always have them right there even when coming back to a code which was written 2-3 years ago.