Jim Blackler

This is great, but I’m trying to used it to get the summary information from core .NET assemblies such as System.Web. The related assemblies are “not found.”

Yet, I believe they are somewhere because you can get the summary information from intellisense or from “go to definition” command and then looking for it in the class view (from metadata).

Any ideas of how to get documentation info from core libraries?

Hi Jim,

I just modded your code to add the ability to specify a basepath:

private static XmlDocument XMLFromAssemblyNonCached(Assembly assembly, String basePath)
{
string assemblyFilename = assembly.CodeBase;
Regex thisResx = new Regex(@”(.*)[\/\\]([^\/\\]+\.\w+)$”, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Multiline);
Match thisMatch = thisResx.Match(assemblyFilename);

const string prefix = “file:///”;
assemblyFilename = prefix + basePath + thisMatch.Groups[2];

if (assemblyFilename.StartsWith(prefix))
{
StreamReader streamReader;

try
{
streamReader = new StreamReader(Path.ChangeExtension(assemblyFilename.Substring(prefix.Length), “.xml”));
}
catch (FileNotFoundException exception)
{
throw new DocsByReflectionException(“XML documentation not present (make sure it is turned on in project properties when building)”, exception);
}

XmlDocument xmlDocument = new XmlDocument();
xmlDocument.Load(streamReader);
return xmlDocument;
}
else
{
throw new DocsByReflectionException(“Could not ascertain assembly filename”, null);
}
}

Hi Jim, this is a great work!

I got a small problem (exception), if I try to get docs for methods without args. As shown here, an XML-file-definition has no “()” brackets as long as the method has an empty ergument list:

This method should write to a file. We write to the console to see the effect this object keeps no state.

After a small improvement in XMLFromMember all works perfectly.

Here is my bug-fix:
//AL: 15.04.2008 ==> BUG-FIX remove “()” if parametersString is empty
if (parametersString.Length > 0)
return XMLFromName(methodInfo.DeclaringType, ‘M’, methodInfo.Name + “(” + parametersString + “)”);
else
return XMLFromName(methodInfo.DeclaringType, ‘M’, methodInfo.Name);

Update for Alex’s fix. Courtney I am still intending to find a way to avoid the user having to manually locate the .XML for GACed assemblies as I think it would be neater, if I cannot I will implement your fix.

Wow… that’s basically my article, but four years before.

I’ll implement the fix for GACed assemblies.

Thanks Jeremy.

Hi Jim,

Does anyone get fix for the ”Unable to cast object of type ‘System.Xml.XmlComment’ to type ‘System.Xml.XmlElement’.” error ?

Arnand and Yonas,

I ran into the same problem with VS2010.

Looks like a node is not always an element – I guess newer versions of VS insert a comment into the generated XML, and Jim’s code was not built to handle those.

I posted a fix here:

https://gist.github.com/815092

(aw, snap, my tags just got filtered… mr. Blackler, please correct the missing <summary> tags in my last post? thx)

Your code does not return summary for Generic Type, Methods a.s.o. :(
Have you ever solved the issue to generate the correct String ID that the compiler makes for each code construct. ???

Hi there Jim and thank you for excellent work with the XML comments. I used your code successfully, but added support for enumerations. Please get back to me if you are interested in the updated source code.

Best regards Tobias Leverin

It turns out this is still the best way to get this reflection working. I found another corner case – When using generics in Visual Studio 2008 (.NET 3.5) the check against the generated XML includes the type argument in square brackets.

This isn’t quite right so we need to strip them out. Here’s the version of the function that I used:


private static XmlElement XMLFromName(Type type, char prefix, string name)
{
string fullName;
string fullTypeName = Regex.Replace(type.FullName, @"\[\[.*?\]\]", "");
if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(name))
{
fullName = prefix + ":" + fullTypeName;
}
else
{
fullName = prefix + ":" + fullTypeName + "." + name;
}

return matchedElement;
}