October 21, 2007
I was just checking out the documentation on MSDN about XML comments and I discovered that C# supports multi-line comments for XML documentation as well:
/**
* <summary>Hello World!</summary>
*/
public void HelloWorld() { }
Interesting, but I wouldn't recommend using multi-line comments for a few reasons:
- They do not support Smart Comment Editing, where by Visual Studio inserts multiple comment lines and an empty summary tag automatically after starting the comment, which in this case is done by typing /** instead of ///.
- Intellisense is limited:
- top-level tags are listed but context is ignored (e.g., the para tag is never listed, even if the cursor is within a summary element).
- Entering a tag name and pressing enter will not produce a closing tag automatically.
- The rules for processing markup may be problematic since the compiler will look for a prefix pattern consisting of white-space, an asterisk and more white-space; however, a slight change in formatting in the prefix of one or more lines (e.g., less leading white-space) may cause the compiler to include one or more asterisks as part of the comments.
- They are certainly not as common as triple-slash comments and will probably be confusing to most people (I know if I were to have seen this format used, and I already may have, I would have doubted whether it was even valid.)
I'm curious to know if anyone has found this feature to be more useful than triple-slash comments, and why :)