The rest of this post is split into three sections: What this means is that if you can get your developers to comment their code, you can generate a decent body of documentation.
Doxygen newline code#
If they don't have good documentation of what a custom workflow activity does and the inputs it expects, they're likely to get unexpected results when using it.īut assuming you convince your developers of the need to generate documentation, you may still have a problem in that it's not something that comes easily to them, so how can you make it easier? The obvious answer is to generate documentation based on the source code itself, and that's where Doxygen comes in.ĭoxygen is the de facto standard tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ sources, but it also supports other popular programming languages such as C, Objective-C, C#, PHP, Java, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, Tcl, and to some extent D. For example, think of a situation in which you have primarily functional consultants building workflows. When a developer prepares these, the people who work with the activities later may very well not have access to the source code, and even if they do, they may not fully understand it. The reasoning - excuse, really - of the first point fails spectacularly when we look at Dynamics CRM custom workflow activities. Second, a typical developer has better coding skills than writing skills. First, in most situations where code isn't being packaged and sold, anybody who needs to work with something that's already been written will likely have access to the source code (including comments), so formal documentation isn't absolutely necessary. (True story - as a brash young developer, I was quick to irritate a business analyst on my team by telling him things like "documentation costs extra.") If you think about it, this lack of desire to document code kind of makes sense.
Doxygen newline software#
Put simply, getting software documented properly after it's written is a pain.ĭevelopers typically don't enjoy preparing documentation, and even if you can get them to document it initially, keeping it updated is always a challenge.
Doxygen newline how to#
CalculateDateByBusinessDays.cs (2.05 kb)Īnd the final output will be this generated CHM file: LucasWorkflowDemo.chm (76.94 kb).Īlthough this sample is focused on documenting an assembly that is used as part of a Dynamics CRM solution, the overall documentation approach and techniques are applicable to any C# project.īefore we look at how to document code using Doxygen, let's step back and take look at the broader problem we need to solve.(Doxygen can actually generate documentation in a variety of different formats, but I'm partial to CHM files because they're entirely self-contained.) For this example, I have a project that consists of these three C# files: In this post I will show how to document a Dynamics CRM 2011 custom workflow activity assembly and use Doxygen to generate a compiled HTML (CHM) help file.
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