I know this maybe a basic question but I just can't seem to find the answer anywhere.
I have a class like this
Table<T>
{}
then I have some code that uses the above class that I would like to comment I would like to be able to do something like:
/// <summary>
/// blah blah blah Table<String>
/// </summary>
But I can't use the angle bracket in the comment as it thinks it's a tag and when the help shows up it just has an error about no end tag for .
How do I show generic classes in comments in Visual Studio.
You need to use XML entities (sort of escape sequences): < for < and > for >. Intellisense will display < as and > correctly.
EDIT: Here's a cheat sheet listing of all of the XML entities:
< for <
> for >
& for &
" for "
' for '
try using an < instead of a <
The problem with < is that it looks ugly and is hard to read in comments. I use the following: GenericThing≪T,U≫. That's not two angle bracket characters but a single character. It looks OK in Intellisense and when reading the comments. If you use <summary> etc to output documentation then it's not strictly correct, but it works for me.
If you place it in a cref element, you can instead use { and }.
That is, inside the summary, instead of Table<string>, you put <cref="Table{string}"/>
From XML Documentation Comments:
To refer to generic identifiers in code reference ... As a special case, the compiler parses the braces [in crefs] as angle brackets to make the documentation comment less cumbersome to author when referring to generic identifiers.
For more info about cref, see cref Attribute:
The cref attribute in an XML documentation tag means "code reference." It specifies that the inner text of the tag is a code element, such as a type, method, or property. Documentation tools like DocFX and Sandcastle use the cref attributes to automatically generate hyperlinks to the page where the type or member is documented.
NOTE: For convenience, I sometimes use {} instead of <> (in a summary comment) even if NOT part of a cref.
