[Opencxx-users] Usage of OpenC++ to generate a documentation from managed C++

[Ferdinand P. <fer...@ix...>]

Hi,

firstly, thank you for publishing such a great framework. I could understand
it really fast.

I need to create a documentation for a .NET assembly written in managed C++
(extension for writing .NET assemblies in C++). Unfortunately the native
documenting tool will exist in 2005 (from Microsoft) for the new syntax only
and there is still no OSS tool to compile or document managed C++ (for
example in the Mono project).

Here we are an example of a source code in the syntax version 1.0:

namespace Test {
    /// <summary>
    /// Summary description for Class.
    /// </summary>
    public __gc class Class : public AbstractClass, public Interface {
        public:
            /// <summary>
            /// Summary description for Class::MethodFromInterface.
            /// </summary>
            virtual System::Object * MethodFromInterface.(System::Object *);
    };
}

And here of a target, which I need to generate:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<doc>
  <members>
    <member name="T:Test.Class">
      <summary>
      Summary description for Class.
      </summary>
    </member>
    <member name="M:Test.Class.MethodFromInterface.(System::Object)">
      <summary>
      Summary description for Class::MethodFromInterface.
      </summary>
    </member>
  </members>
</doc>

I tried to evaluate some more solutions (doxygen, synopsis, ctool,
self-written solution) and find the least expensive one, and also a one,
which I liked to implement... ;-)

Currently I think the best would be to use OpenC++. I took opencxx 2.7 and
did the first version of the tool, which now works. Actually, I only needed
to create a base metaclass for the type modifier __gc and to play with the
class and its members in FinalizeInstance().

What I did:
* created makefiles and projects/solutions for MSVCs producing exe, dll and
static library
* modified sources to compile in MSVCs and also accept headers from MSVCs
(STL)
* extended the lexer and parser to accept managed C++ syntax (not fully yet)
* created documenting mc module writing a XML from comments of parsed
classes

However I needed also to extend the model (only a bit, really... :-),
because of the managed C++ extensions, which I did not want to simply ignore
as some keywords or context-important words (generally, I think that
ignoring is not good because someone else could need do more with the model
than me).

I will have the first fully usable version during this weekend. I would like
to offer the sources (changes) as a contribution to your project and help
with the maintenance, if you liked. I will publish also the documentatin
tool.

What do you think?

Ferda

P.S. By the way, some of you guys really must've used LISP just before
writing OpenC++ :-)