Brief GhostDoc v. 1.0.2 review

Roland Weigelt has an excellent little add-in to VS.NET, called GhostDoc. It recently won 1st price in Roy's add in contest, and it was well deserved. I downloaded it last week and tried it out on our current project, and I can see that it has great potential but falls short in a few areas. I mentioned that on Roland's blog, and he asked me for further feedback which I provided by email - but thought I'd also share here:

Mostly the method names that GhostDoc has trouble resolving are “bad” names that I had chosen. This is to be expected - it's a simple parser, not HAL - and in some cases GD actually helped point these instances out to me. But it also has problems with common composite-action styled method names like DataBind – “Datas the bind. “ wasn’t exactly what I was looking for (“Databind” works fine of course).

Where it really falls short is when I use prefixes to separate and organize methods – for example I have a common web service that exposes web methods from multiple business rule classes – in this case I use the original class name as the prefix followed by an underscore – e.g. Company_SearchParent. For this GD returns “Company_s the search parent.”

What I’d like to see is some way to set filters for (regular) expressions that GD should match, as well as filters that it should NOT match. Along with the excellent filters you have already included, that should make it capable of handling most anything (in English at least). That way I could say – exclude prefixes that end in _ so in the above example GD would just see SearchParent, which it handles quite nicely: “Searches the parent.”

Actually, come to think of it, I believe GD needs to have some special setting for underscores to handle the default names of event handlers: for example, my listDetail control has an InitializeLayout event; so VS.Net generates the method name listDetail_InitializeLayout. The expected summary of this method would be “Initializes the layout of the listDetail.” But GD generates “Lists the detail_ initialize layout.”. If GD was set to by default treat anything preceding an underscore as the indirect object of an action, that would solve both this situation and that above – I would get “Searches the parent of the Company” which is exactly what I’m doing. But some kind of regex filters would still be great…

Additionally, there needs to be user changeable settings for common terms: the term ID is one I’d like to keep as ID; i. d. looks strange to me. Similarly, an event handler’s EventArgs parameter, which VS.NET by default names e, ought to be trapped and expanded on (of course here you run into potential conflicts with Exceptions, which some people also give the name e – but that is why I use exc for Exceptions…).

Overall, this is a great tool, but I think these changes would make it even better.