VS 2010 Package - Providing 'online' help

Question

Hi,

Our with package we providing help documentation which is installed 'local', but we
would also provide the 'online' version as VS 2010 provide both options,
and we don't want to force our customers to install the help local just for our
package..

but what is required for this to be setup? Is it as simple as have a (public domain) web
server that hosts the help page?

Is there any documentation or guidelines on this with respect to the VS extendibility?

Regards

Fred

Answer 1

Hi Fred,

If you want to provid online document for your products, you can host all document in a public domain. In your UI of the prodocut, you can launch the webbrowser to display the document with reserved URL.

Regards,

Yi

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Yi Feng Li [MSFT]
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us

Answer 2

Hi Yi,

Thx for you response. In this case the 'product' is a Package/Project inside VS 2010. So if we were to provide 'online' documenation then

1) How would VS now what our URL is for our help ?

2) how would it work when a user would select Help / Manage Help Settings in the VS IDE.. and then switch from online to local help and then selects the "Intalll content from Online'?

Hope this make sense...

Fred

Answer 3

Hi Fred,

This isn't possible. Currently, there is no support for hosting custom integrated VS help content online. The current help system is pretty much hard wired to pull stuff from our own MSDN website. As far as I'm aware this is still the case for the next release as well.

Sincerely,

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Ed Dore

Answer 4

Hi Ed,

Thx for the answer!

Might be a nice feature to have for packages on day..-:)

Regards,

Fred