.NET Fixing C# XML Comments so they Work in Windows XP SP2

The C# language in Visual Studio 2003 allows you to create XML comments by including comments that start with ///. Unfortunately, Window XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) causes those comment pages not to display correctly. What happens is that the compiler that creates the comments places a special comment in the header of each page, called a Mark of the Web (MOTW). This MOTW causes Windows XP to place the pages constructed by the comment compiler into the Restricted Zone, where none of the comment page functionality works.

There is no easy solution to the problem. I did, however, come up with a not-so-easy solution. You can modify each file to place it into the Internet Zone instead of the Restricted Zone. You can do this with a batch file that executes a Windows version of the Unix SED utility. You will need to download the SED utility from somewhere. One place you can download the utility is from SourceForge.

You will then need a batch file that will modify your files. That batch file should look like this:

Save this file to fixdoc.bat. Make sure SED is on the path, or modify the batch file to have the full path to the SED program, like this:

where c:\program files\utilities is replaced by the location where the SED program was saved.

After you have these two tools, you can then fix the documentation files by running:

fixdoc c:\src\myprog\documentation

where c:\src\myprog\documentation should be replaced by the location of your XML documentation files. This fixes the MOTW to place the files in the Internet Zone instead of the Restricted Zone.

You can then add the fixdoc command to the Tools Menu of Visual Studio as an External Tool. Make sure you set both the arguments and initial directory textboxes to be the full path of where your document files are stored, and check the checkbox for use output window.