Question

First noticed this in Notepad++, where // comments and /// comments were shown in different colours.

Doxygen revealed more about it, but I’m not convinced about its efficacy.

1. Why would anyone use the three slashing commenting style when it’s far easier to type /* and */? (I figure there has to be a better explanation than it being useful when nesting comments)
2. For it to be usable, do editors support block commenting for triple slashes in the way that Visual Studio has support for Ctrl+k Ctrl+c for multi-line comments?

Answer 1

In Visual Studio the /// indicates documentation not just comments. Following your link the explanation is the same. It is used to adorn comments that will be specifically formatted via your editor or some other tool as documentation for a class, method, namespace, etc.