"C# allows developers to embed XML comments into their source files—a useful facility, especially when more than one programmer is working on the same code. The C# parser can expand these XML tags to provide additional information and export them to an external document for further processing. This article shows how to use XML comments and explains the relevant tags. The author demonstrates how to set up your project to export your XML comments into convenient documentation for the benefit of other developers. He also shows how to use comments to generate help files. "

Dino expounds on a subject near and dear to my heart -- databinding in WinForms.

XsdClassesGen is a Custom Tool Add-In to VS.NET 2002 & 2003 to generate type-safe wrapper classes for serializing to and from XML documents. It takes as input an XSD and produces the C# or VB.NET code to do the serialization using the XmlSerializer. This is really just the output of running xsd.exe /classes, but integrated directly into VS.NET.

If you’d like to know more about what a custom tool is and how to build your own, check out CollectionGen.

Also, Atif Aziz used some of my custom tool code and built a generic VS.NET code generator shim that allows you to build a code generator that plugs into VS.NET by implementing a single method.

And, as if that weren’t enough, Stephane Tombeur has posted the code to VS2005. Thanks, Stephane!

From Razvan Caciula: Nick Hodapp publishes an interesting ActiveX Control Library (ATL) giving you the permission to include it in a commercial application. Cool work, Nick :)

“Star Wars: The Han Solo Affair is the new film from Spite Your Face Productions, produced for The Lego Group. and developed with the cooperation of Lucasfilm. The stop-motion animated LEGO short presents an ‘alternative’ version of the events which follow Han Solo’s capture in The Empire Strikes Back.”

I laughed ’til I cried.

Don’t miss COBOL for .NET!

“NetCOBOL ™ opens doors to leverage existing COBOL code while taking advantage of the innovative Microsoft .NET platform.”

“SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator (code named OlyMars) is both a flexible and powerful code generator based on database modeling.

“It allows instant generation of both SQL and .Net code providing a complete library of stored procedures, .NET classes and ready-to-use Windows/Web form controls (including associated documentation).

“SQL Server Centric .NET Code Generator is also fully extensible to use one’s own custom templates and consequently can be adjusted to generate any custom code respecting a homogeneous implementation scheme within the company (can be written either in VB .NET or C# .NET).”

This seems to have punted on the multi-language issues, however. sigh.

From Razvan Caciula:

“The objective for the iNET development team is to re-create the complete .NET deployment framework entirely in Java.”

“For instance with iNET, corporations can deploy .NET based applications integrated with a J2EE server hosted completely on an IBM mainframe and/or Linux instead of Windows.”

Anyone has used this mixture? :)