.NET Documentation tool for Visual Basic (VB.NET)

Document! X is a combination of an automated Visual Basic (VB.NET) documentation tool and a full documentation authoring environment which can be used to create accurate, professional quality documentation for assemblies created with VB.NET or any other .NET language (C#, F#, C++/CLI etc.).

Document! X is not just an automated VB.NET documentation build tool - it is also includes a fully featured documentation authoring environment allowing you to create supplementary content (descriptions and remarks for Namespaces, Classes, Interfaces, Enumerations, members, hyperlinks to related pages, example code, index keywords etc.) where required.

Document! X is the documentation tool chosen by leading .NET component vendors including Infragistics, Xceed, Telerik, Dundas, Janus, Farpoint and GrapeCity.

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Why Choose Document! X for Visual Basic Documentation? 

  • Fast, accurate, professional quality documentation;
  • Market leading authoring tools for creating supplementary content;
  • Documentation pages generated for assembly, namespace, class, interface, structure, enumeration, constructor, method, property, field, delegate;
  • Generate documentation to HTML Help 1.x (CHM), Help 2.x, Microsoft Help Viewer or web ready pure HTML including a full Table of Contents, Index and Full Text Search.
  • Customizable HTML based template driven output can be adapted to your requirements and ships with standard phrases pre-translated to 9 different languages;
  • Automatically integrates the generated documentation with the Visual Studio Help system;

Sample Outputs

These sample outputs illustrate how much can be generated by Document! X right out of the box. All of the Document! X Templates are fully customizable and can be easily adapted or extended to meet your specific requirements.

Live Samples

Author Visual Basic XML comments in Visual Studio in a Visual Comment Editor

Document! X makes Visual Basic XML comments easier to work with by including a Visual Comment Editor integrated with Visual Studio® 2010-2022.

The Visual Comment Editor allows you to work within a preview of the generated documentation page whilst still reading and writing the content to and from source in standard .NET XML comment format. If you prefer, you can continue to author Visual Basic XML source comments manually.

Document! X will use any Visual Basic XML source comments where they are available - including all of the comment types that Microsoft define in the XML comment specification for Visual Basic and C#.

Author Content in a Document! X Content File

You can also author content outside of Visual Basic source code if you wish, or combine both approaches and have some content in Visual Basic source XML comments and some in Document! X Content Files.

This approach is quite common as it allows technical writers to contribute more extensive content or examples, or override content defined in source comments for editorial reasons, without stopping developers from documenting in the source.

The same great authoring environment, including dynamic spell check, hyperlink designer and designers for example code, permissions, exceptions, index keywords etc. are available both in the Visual Studio Integrated VB.NET Visual Comment Editor and in the Document! X Content File Editor.

Object Model Diagrams

Document! X automatically generates object relationship diagrams for your classes. Specific relationships can be ignored where necessary (e.g. a relationship back to a parent object). Collection objects are automatically recognized and appropriately represented.

Benefits of using Document! X

Using Document! X as your Visual Basic documentation tool immediately delivers the following benefits:

  1. Visual Basic documentation can be built by Document! X in moments, reducing the amount of manual effort involved in creating a documentation set to virtually zero;
  2. The Visual Comment Editor integrated with Visual Studio dramatically simplifies the process of documenting in Visual Basic source code and gives the developer a view of the whole documentation page which makes it easy to spot gaps in the documentation and typos;
  3. The documentation generated by Document! X is accurate and always up to date. Creating the same documentation manually is error prone and very labor intensive;
  4. Documentation for the assembly you have documented is immediately available in Visual Studio using F1;
  5. Producing a documentation set for your Visual Basic project makes it more maintainable as there is a structured reference to accompany the source code and API;

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