Product Review
VideoSoft vsDocs
vsDocs is one of those products that when you hear about them, you immediatly ponder why you haven't thought of it first.
So what does it do? As we all know, documentation is the last thing to get done for any project and everyone dreads doing it. I mean, I didn't spend 7 years in college to write stupid help files. Well, vsDocs comes to the rescue. It takes a completed & compiled ActiveX component (DLL or OCX) or a Type Library (TLB or OLB), figures out all the public methods, properties, events, interfaces, objects, constants and other goodies. Then it presents it so that you can type a description, syntax, remarks, example for each of the public interfaces. After you are finished, you can automatically generate a standard Windows Help file or a RTF file. In other words, it is a documentation tool.
Lest you think that you can't include anything else
in your help file other than public interfaces, vsDocs allows you to add custom
topics. In addition, you have control, though somewhat limited, over the
style and layout of the presentation.
I found another use of vsDocs when someone handed me an ActiveX DLL with no documentation. vsDocs quickly generated a small help file and I was able to start using the ActiveX DLL without having to call the author of the component. Actually, this function of the program is potentionally more important than its primary responsibility of creating documentation.
To test the product properly I generated online help for one of our commercial controls and the help file pretty much mimicked the VB5 style of online help, which is really the way to go. It looked good, had pretty good links and most of all, I didn't have to do too much typing.
Having heaped all this praise upon this product, I should point out that it has some significant shortcomings and show-stopping bugs. I was able to live with the problems, you may not. My documentation is normally geared to my fellow VB programmers. So imagine my surprise when vsDocs interpreted the Byte data type as Unsigned Character . vsDocs allows you to manually type in the data type, which I did, but what a pain. In the same manner, vsDocs interprets standard VB arrays as OLEType 8200(wtf???).
I felt that since most VideoSoft products are geared towards VB heads, they should have taken extra care (or at least provide an option) to change COM types to VB types.
I also experienced a complete data loss with this product. I've created documentation, generated a help file, saved the project and exited. When I tried to reopen the project, vsDocs simply refused. This happened twice so far. Luckily, I was able to copy & paste the text from the help file I generated earlier.
Among other improvements, I would like to see are resizible textboxes. When you resize the application, only the Remarks text box gets larger - the others stay the same. When you have a large description, it can get pretty annoying when only 3 lines are visible. A modern toolbar wouldn't hurt either.
If you changed (like added a method) your component and want to update the help file, at first it seems that it can't be done. Indeed, it is very unintuitive. Eventually a trip to VideoSoft knowledge base resolved the problem.
Adding a bitmap is also totally & utterly unintuitive. What's more, it is not documented in the help file. You basically have to type various commands proprietary to the Help system.
The product is in version 1.0.20. It hasn't been updated in a while, so I don't know whether they will keep on supporting the product with new releases in the future. Or maybe VideoSoft feels that since vsDocs is the only product of its kind on the market (I haven't found another one), it can afford to let it languish a bit.
You can get a fully functional demo version at www.videosoft.com