Comments from accompanying XML documentation file aren't shown in VS 2010/2012

Question

At some point we detected that the comments from the XML documentation files for our .NET assemblies (DLL components) are neither displayed in VS 2010 nor in VS 2012. What could be the reason? Do we need some special settings (in the registry, etc) to get it working?

Answer 1

Found why this happened. We are using our internal tool to generate XML documentation files for our products – but not the equivalent C# compiler feature (in fact, the compiler’s /doc switch). Our documentation tool produces XML comment files in Unicode format, but the big surprise it does not processed by VS 2010/2012! Neither Big Endian nor Little Endian. The C# compiler gives us an ANSI XM comments file, and it works ok.

What to do if you need not only ANSI charset? Use UTF-8. I checked this –works ok in VS.