Help for (Visual Studio) Help in VS 2010 (and VS2010 SP1)

Kimberly Wolk - Help Viewer in Visual Studio 2010 RC (and beyond)

“Tomorrow, February 10^th, we’ll be releasing the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate to the public. If you didn’t have a chance to evaluate Beta 2, we’re shipping a new Help Viewer with Visual Studio. The new Help Viewer has tight integration with MSDN online providing a product-to-MSDN experience for Search, F1 queries, and on-demand help content updates.

Since Beta 2, we’ve received a lot of feedback from our customers and partners. I want to thank everyone for logging Connect bugs, completing the Beta2 survey, or providing feedback through the forums or other channels. We are listening and we’re addressing as much of your feedback as possible before RTM.

The rest of this post will focus on the improvements we’ve delivered in the RC release and those that are in-flight for RTM. For the RC release, we’ve focused our efforts in the following areas:

• Keyword Index
• Help Library Agent
• Help Library Manager
• Support for third-party help content
• F1 Help quality

…

…”

I’m glad to see VS Help is really getting some help. While many of us have moved away from internal help to just directly web searching (or remapping our F1’s, etc) there looks like there is some hope for the future.

I’m hoping that what appears to be a complete reworking of the local MSDN/VS Help infrastructure will be just the ticket. We’ll see.

I do have to say I’m not sure about the whole “Help Library Agent” (fka “Help Listener”) thing. It reminds me of the Google Desktop search (aka a pseudo local web server like thing)… But I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt. Actually working, helping me find stuff and not irritate me with the 5 minute “Rebuilding” aka, “Oh crap I hit F1! Might as well go get some coffee,” delay  will give it a lot of credibility in my mind…

(via The Morning Brew - The Morning Brew #536)

 

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VS2010 RC now available on MSDN Subscribers Download. General availably coming tomorrow (February 10th)
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