I have just recently been asked to document 10 years worth of VB6 development done by one person. It's been some time since I looked at VB6 code myself, so I'm basically wondering if anyone has any tips for how best to go about it.
Is there any good software, free or not, which would do something similar to javadoc out there for VB6, that could be helpful?
Or just if anyone have any suggestion for tools / methods on how to do this. Any tip would be greatly appreciated.
You can try VBDox, which is a free VB6 source code documentation generator.
I used to code in VB6 a loooong time ago, and I never encountered any decent tools that helped with documentation in the Javadoc sense.
I would approach this from the angle of what needs to be documented: is it for developers to understand the API or is it for a user to work with the application? Assuming the former, then what is the bare minimum that you can get away with such that a developer can follow what is going on? You may be able to avoid documenting every method, and just provide a general hand waving use case based approach that could be separate from the code entirely and be based on your explorations. A few good diagrams goes a long way to transferring understanding.
If it is for the user to work the application, then you're into the realms of the help compiler. You might be lucky and find one of this lot is still available: http://help-compiler.qarchive.org/
Alternatively, if it must be the equivalent of Javadocs or you don't get paid, then you may want to consider writing a tool to scan over the source code and do a large portion of the boilerplate parameter filling for you. A tool like Unix AWK can really help here.
Our VBdocman does exactly what you need. It uses javaDoc comments and it can generate several output formats.
You may find my add-in, Atomineer Pro Documentation helpful. It can generate and update JavaDoc, Qt, Doxygen and Xml-Documentation comments in source code (Visual Basic, C#, C++/CLI, C++, C, Java, unrealscript), and you have a lot of control over the format it produces.
(edit: please note that this addin only works in Visual Studio versions from 2005 onwards, so you cannot use it in VB6, only to document old VB6 code using a newer version of Visual Studio. Once documented however, it can still of course be reloaded and compiled in VB6)
(You could say it generates the "boilerplate" documentation for you, but it generates a lot more than just a basic boilerplate skeleton - it fills in as much detail as possible to minimise the amount of additional documentation you need to write)
So it doesn't create external documentation from the comments (like JavaDoc), it creates the comments themselves - so you would still need another tool to generate the external documentation. However, AtomineerUtils would save a lot of time if you have to generate new documentation comments for existing (undocumented) code, or if you already have the code commented/documented in a Javadoc style, AtomineerUtils can process the documentation comments to convert them to Doxygen or XML Documentation formats, which may help you to gain compatibility with other tools (Sandcastle, etc) that can build external documentation for you.
To generate the external documentation from source-code comments, Doxygen is a leading (and free) external-documentation generation tool that can build documentation from JavaDoc, Qt, Doxygen or Dcoumentation-XML format documentation-comments, and is well worth trying out.
