Rami Vemula

Documentation of code, arrrgh!!! Most of us hate it, but believe me its an important part in SDLC. Especially when it comes to maintenance of legacy code, Documentation is a life savior.

Writing Xml Comments in Visual Studio is not going to be a easy going task (for large projects it’s a nightmare too). So I started using GhostDoc, an extension of Visual Studio, which helps and makes Xml commenting comparatively easier. There are many other extensions available which give the same functionality in writing comments, but in this small JumpStart I would like to show how to get started with GhostDoc.

In this tutorial, we see how to develop a simple comments section. This comments section is going to be a similar one to what we usually see in our day to day experience. Here we use TinyMCE editor to enable Html Comments. And also catpcha is enabled (with the help of reCaptcha of Google). The basic outline would be – Users provide their general details like name and email, and also they can provide Html Comment (using TinyMCE), and finally they should enter the text showed in the captcha for validating robots. Then we take the Html string, encode it using HtmlEncode(), store it in database. Finally we retrieve the encoded string from the database, we then decode it and display it in the page as Comment.

In this tutorial, I create a sample Database “Example” with a table “Images” which olds the information about images like ImageName, ImageDescription and ImagePath. Then I use a SqlDataSource in combination with Repeater to display the images from the database onto the page. Here we use GalleryView to make the slideshow of images in the repeater along with display of the particular image which is in focus.