Note
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories.
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try changing directories.
The new home for Visual Studio documentation is Visual Studio 2017 Documentation on docs.microsoft.com.
The latest version of this topic can be found at XML Documentation (Visual C++).
In Visual C++, you can add comments to your source code that will be processed to an .xml file. This file can then be the input to a process that creates documentation for the classes in your code.
In a Visual C++ code file, XML documentation comments must be located directly prior to a method or type definition. The comments can be used to populate the Intellisense QuickInfo data tip in the following scenarios:
when the code is compiled as a Windows Runtime component with an accompanying .winmd file
when the source code is included in the current project
in a library whose type declarations and implementations are located in the same header file
Note
In the current release, code comments are not processed on templates or anything containing a template type (for example, a function taking a parameter as a template). Adding such comments will result in undefined behavior.
For details on creating an .xml file with documentation comments, see the following topics.
| For information about | See |
|---|---|
| The compiler options to use | /doc |
| Tags you can use to provide commonly used functionality in documentation | Recommended Tags for Documentation Comments |
| The ID strings that the compiler produces to identify the constructs in your code | Processing the .xml File |
| How to delimit documentation tags | Delimiters for Visual C++ Documentation Tags |
| Generating an .xml file from one or more .xdc files. | XDCMake Reference |
| Links to information about XML as it relates to Visual Studio feature areas | XML in Visual Studio |
If you need to put XML special characters in the text of a documentation comment, you must use XML entities or a CDATA section.