How to reconcile Visual Studio comment expectations with code having Doxygen comments?

Question

It is normal for code that was written for Doxygen processing to have lines like this.

int myVariable; ///< description of myVariable

However, when Visual Studio (e.g. VS 2015) is working with code prepared with these Doxygen comments, its tooltip information for myVariable will show

XML comment contains invalid XML: Whitespace is not allowed at this location.

The problem appears to be the presence of "<" immediately following "///". That appears to be interpreted by Visual Studio as signalling (improperly formatted) XML content. However, this combination is present with the "<" to signal to Doxygen that the comment applies to the preceding item on the line, not to a following item.

Assume that we are talking about an existing body of code that already follows this Doxygen convention. It is already written this way in many places.

Is there a way to adjust or teach or set Visual Studio so that it will treat such comments as normal documenting comments for the preceding item such that they will appear in the tooltips for these items?

Answer 1

Doxygen has different comment styles (see manual the section about "special comment blocks", in this case the paragraph about "Putting documentation after members". Here we see the possibilities:

int var; /**< Detailed description after the member */
or
int var; //!< Detailed description after the member
//!<
or
int var; ///< Detailed description after the member

In this case we can switch from ///< to //!<