How to quickly document your ASP website code

Do you need to create documentation for your ASP web application source code? While you could do this by hand, it's worth investing in a utility called the ASP Documentation Tool. This handy little tool will quickly document all your code for you, leaving you with time to devote to less boring tasks. Both the VBScript and JScript scripting languages are supported.

The ASP Documentation Tool code documentor automatically creates source code documentation in a number of formats:

• HTML format is useful for placing a handy web application source code documentation reference on your company's or your client's Intranet website. The web application's source code is fully color coded using a similar color scheme used by Visual Studio when editing ASP source code.
• HTML Help format is the standard Microsoft Windows help file format, and allows the ASP web application's documentation to be contained within a single file. HTML Help database documentation produced by the ASP Documentation Tool also has a nice index of code entities such as functions, subroutines and constants, and is even fully searchable!
• Microsoft Word/RTF format database documentation is great for printing and showing your line manager!
• Text format documentation can form the basis of other documentation that you might be told to write for an application.

Active Server Pages (ASP) has been around for a long time now, but there are a surprising amount of ASP powered websites still around today. The ASP Documentation Tool can examine website code, making it much easier to determine how much work would be involved in porting ASP code to a different platform such as ASP.NET or PHP.

The ASP Documentation Tool supports all the major web application file types such as global.asa files, JavaScript include files (.js) and Cascading Style Sheets (.css). Important code entities such as Application and Session variables are identified within the code.

Many ASP web applications make use of code compiled as ActiveX dll's. The ASP Documentation Tool can identify where 3rd party and other components are called from within an ASP application. It is also able to document the Visual Basic 6.0 source code associated with ActiveX dll's (provided it's given access to the source code!).

As well as the .NET C# or VB.NET source code, the .NET Documentation Tool can also document SQL Server, Microsoft Access or MySQL databases associated with an ASP web application. The documentation can therefore show tables, views and stored procedures associated with an application. For dedicated SQL Server database documentation, a SQL Documentation Tool is also available.

So if you want to save your valuable time then give the ASP Documentation Tool a go (a free trial version is available for download).

A .NET Documentation Tool is also available - this documents any type of .NET Framework project or solution that was developed in either the C# or VB.NET programming language.