Exercise 15.2
Give Doxygen a Try

This exercise is guided tour in using Doxygen together with Visual C# 2008 Express. The exercise will help you set up the BankAccount documentation example, which we have seen on an earlier slide page in this lecture.

We will assume that you already have installed Doxygen and that you use Visual C# 2008 Express.

Start Visual C# 2008 Express. Use File > New Project... and make (at least in this exercise) a Class Library project.

Insert the BankAccount class in Visual C# 2008 Express in the usual way.

Do File > Save All. Notice the location of you project. On a piece of paper (or in a text editor) notice the full file path to your Visual C# 2008 project.

Start the Doxywizard program, which comes together with Doxygen.

In the Wizard > Project field: Give a name to your project. Just chose a suitable name.

In the Source Code Directory field, select the full path to the directory where Visual C# 2008 Express stores the source files. This is the directory in which Visual C# 2008 express stores the files with .cs file extension. You find this directory inside the Visual C# 2008 express project directory, which you captured earlier in this exercise. Relative to the way C# source programs are organized, it is usually not necessary to select Scan recursively.

In the Destination directory field select the directory in which you want to store the documentation which Doxygen generates. An existing directory of your choice.

In Wizard > Mode select the extraction mode. Try first documented entities only. It is recommended that you explicitly document the entries which appear in your documentation. Select the Java or C# programming language option.

In Wizard > Output select one of the HTML options (try first plain HTML). Deselect LaTeX.

In Doxygen, save the doxygen setup via File > Save or File > SaveAs.... This will make a file called Doxyfile. The Doxyfile contains all the settings of Doxygen. At another occasion, you can continue working on a particular batch of documentation by doing a File > Open... on the Doxyfile.

Now, in the Run tab, activate the button Run doxygen.

Use the button Show HTML output to look at the generated HTML documentation in your browser.

 

Notice that Doxygen is a very rich tool. Take a look at some of the Expert options in the DoxyWizard. There exists another note, written by a former student, Dan Jensen. You are encouraged read Dans note as your next step in getting familiar with Doxygen.