Help on Visual Studio 2010 Help

If you have used VS 2010’s help system you may have that feeling that some changes were not as fully thought as others.  The new HTML Help 3 format may seems like a great idea, it runs as a service like an IIS website that all help instances query through.  No more hitting F1 in three copies of Visual Studio and getting three copies of the complete help loaded into RAM.

But that browser experience for the help system seems missing something to me.  Maybe the index?  Maybe the ability to actually read rather than search?  It seems optimized quite well for searching the help, but not actually following a topic.  You can’t sync the table of contents and see what other articles are in the same section of the help.

I want to cover the built in help, the Help Powertool released by Microsoft, and the H3Viewer application from The Helpware Group that allows local viewing of the html 3 help files (although Microsoft insists on calling them Help 1.0 Files).

F1 Help in VS 2010

Here is what I see when I hit F1 in Visual Studio 2010.  You get a system tray icon with the help service running and a browser window.

You have to already opted to install the help locally as a part of the install process, or you only talk to the remote servers at Microsoft. 

There was a bug in the beta versions that if the user selected non local help for the MSDN then ALL help was non local (even if your company put some help locally the users couldn’t see it).  I hope that has been fixed, but have not had time to test it myself again yet.

Help Powertools

There is a Help Powertools download from MSDN.  The tool installs a Silverlight panel into your browser for a nicer search experience.

See the bottom where it has the Contents pane, Search Results, and an Index!

It still runs in your browser, but Scott Hansleman has a post explaining how to run standalone Help Powertool as well.

Once you follow the command line instructions you can then see the help in a stand alone app.

The experience is essentially the same, but you can now pin the help to the taskbar as a separate app rather than having to use a tab in your web browser.

Some limits on the Powertool

From the release notes section on the Powertool you will see some limits.

• Supported Editions: The Help Viewer Power Tool works with all editions of Visual Studio 2010, except for TFS
• Supported Languages: The Help Viewer Power Tool is not localized (i.e. it has an EN-US user interface) but it is compatible with localized editions of Visual Studio.
• Supported Browsers: Your default browser must support Silverlight when Help Viewer is configured for in-browser experience. (The standalone mode does not have this dependency.). You will need to turn off IE Enhanced Security on Windows Server

H3Viewer from The Helpware Group

The last option I would like to present is actually my favorite.  The H3Viewer allows viewing of the local help files, does not run in the browser, and has some options you don’t get in either of the Microsoft solutions.

Notice the table of contents on the left looks much different.  You can also search, and then sync the TOC back to see where in the help you are currently.  I find this a required way to work through a spec on something like ADO.Net where searching will scatter you all over the help, but through the Table of Contents you can read in a logical manner.  I know, I know, no one reads anymore.  Everyone only searches the help.  Maybe I am just weird.

You can also save bookmarks in the viewer directly instead of polluting your browser bookmarks with MSDN local links.

Building these help files?

Well, I haven’t gotten that far yet.  Our help vendor obviously doesn’t support this new format yet, but we will be looking into this as an option for future builds.

It sounds like deploying them should be a lot easier because you can drop them locally and not have to go through the whole painful msdev help merge process that takes forever in VS 2008 with a lot of help files.  So in theory this should speed up installs in the long run (unless you have VS 2008 installed, then you will still have to go through it).