Wednesday 4 April 2012

SharePoint List Designer in Visual Studio 11

I have recorded a ScreenCast describing one of the new Features of Visual Studio 11 that is the SharePoint List Designer:


Tuesday 3 April 2012

JavaScript XML Documentation in Visual Studio 2012

So I have been playing around with Visual Studio 2012 developer preview recently. From a SharePoint developers perspective, there are a lot of new features which will improve the productivity such as the List Designer, Remote Deployment of Solutions etc. Also, from a JavaScript developers perspective, there are a truck load of new features which make your life quite easy and productive. Visual Studio 2012 treats JavaScript as a first class citizen with functionality such as Intellisense and 'Go to function definition'.

One of the exciting features is the XML documentation comments functionality which allows the developer to provide XML comments to functions which the Intellisense picks up and displays accordingly. Also, more than one signature can be displayed for overloaded functions. Lets have a look at an example:



One quirky thing is that we have to put the documentation inside the function. The <signature> element describes the documentation for one implementation of the function. The <summaryelement describes the description of that implementation. The <param> element describes the details about one parameter of the function. The <returns> describes the type of the value which the function returns. And as you can see from the following image, the Intellisense does indeed pick it up and display the documentation accordingly.





Here is the complete list of elements supported by the  <signature> element:

Also, the XML documentation functionality goes beyond the signatures. Here is the complete documentation available right now: