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 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.