Introducing Doxygen

Last Wednesday evening, I gave a presentation on Doxygen at RockNUG.  I didn’t actually bother with slides in order to give as much time as possible to actually demonstrating how the tool worked, so this blog post will fill in some of those gaps.

Doxygen is just one of a number of tools that generate documentation from the comments in source code.  In addition to C# “triple-slash” comments, Doxygen can generate documentation from Java, Python, and PHP source.  In addition to HTML, Doxygen can provide documentation in XML, LaTeX, and RTF formats.

Getting up to speed quickly is pretty easy with Doxywizard.  It will walk you through configuring all the necessary values in wizard or expert mode.  When you save the configuration file it generates, the purpose and effect of each setting is thoroughly documented.  One thing I will note that may not be readily apparent is that you can run Doxygen against multiple directories with source code to get a single set of documentation.  It just requires that the value of your input (INPUT) property contain all of those directories (instead of a single one).