Copying Xml comments for implemented intefaces

Question

When you use a tool like Resharper to implement an interface, you can choose to copy the Xml documentation markup. Of course there are times when the comments are going to be different for the concrete classes - but in the cases where they are identical, we now have a clear violation of don't repeat yourself. Is this an unavoidable violation of DRY if we need to create good API docs using tools like Sandcastle?

Answer 1

I'd say that it is currently unavoidable but could be addressed with preprocessing or some compiler shenanigans based on a different XML doc tag such as <inherit/>. Maybe we'll get something like that in future editions of the compiler for C# and other languages that support XML docs.