Many programming languages have well defined standards for
documenting source code. These standards are useful in that they allow
developers to add comments to code in a uniform format. Furthermore, it is
possible to use tools to extract the documentation from an entire application's
source code and use it to automatically produce project technical documentation
in a fraction of the time it would take to manually produce the documentation.
Programming languages such as Java have had code
documentation standards for many years. The Java system is called JavaDoc, and allows developers to
easily create HTML format documentation from the project source code.
Since classic Active Server Pages (ASP) has no defined
standards of source code documentation, ASP web application documentation of
source code can vary enormously from project to project. While applications,
such as the ASP
Documentation Tool, can create comprehensive technical documentation from
any ASP source code, lack of a defined documentation standard is a major
limitation of ASP. Visual Basic 6.0 is similarly affected by a lack of
documentation standards.
Thankfully, with the introduction of the .NET Framework,
Microsoft included some form of code documentation standards. Sadly, with the
1.0 and 1.1 releases of the .NET Framework, the standards were only supported
in the new C# programming language. Not including the standards officially in
Visual Basic's replacement, VB.NET was a curious omission. Thankfully though,
the 2.0 release of the .NET Framework includes the documentation standards that
C# .NET developers had been enjoying for several years.