Microsoft Help Viewer - New Help System in Visual Studio 2010 | kmcgrath

nmarcel
The Singularity is near.

I agree with the previous critics.

The single most used feature of the current help explorer, for me at least, is that large index where dynamic search happens.

The fact that classes and members appear next to other similiar, has helped me a lot for discover new things.

lonnie

Definitely need some kind of Index UI. I spend all my time in dexplore on the Index tab because I usually know exactly what I am looking for and things are indexed in such a way that it usually provides a great experience.

In lieu of an index (for v1 at least) you could do some kind of type ahead drop down in the search box. That gives you both paradigms and lets us Index junkies tap into the power of a real search interface. It would also be nice to be able pin the type ahead box in place and navigate to search results and help content in a frame so that I can quickly browse through related search results without the hassle of constantly going back (either via the back button or through tab management). If you implemented this in such that I don't lose my search result context and can quickly click through different results it would be very much like the current Index UI in dexplore but miles better because the search is much richer.

If you could get these requests in for 1.0 (or soon thereafter) I would absolutely love the new system and this is coming from someone who really likes and gets a lot of use out of dexplore.

Darrin7

It's been said mant times that MS changes things based on how they think it should work, but don't truly ask lots of users...and in most cases don't give you the option to do it differently. Herding everyone into searching for everything rather than using the index is stupid. Please give back the index. What good does it do to remove something that wasn't hurting anyone in the first place. The index is much easier for me to not only logically find things, but to see where they fit in the parent topic. Why would a company who promotes thinking intelligently, guide people into a lack of thinking by just searching for everything.

tbaxter

When I started using VS 2010 B2 and started using the "Help Viewer" (so-called), I thought I must have had something mis-configured. This can't be the real help system for VS 2010. Unfortunately, this Channel 9 video indicates it is.

I'm still in shock to think this is what Microsoft intends to release w/VS 2010. This is garbage -- total, unbridled garbage, compared to what we had in VS 2008.

I agree that an HTML-based "viewer" could be made functional with enough AJAX, but as it stands now, this "viewer" is unusable. I'll keep VS 2008 installed just for the better help system.

I am so disappointed and I believe 99% of the other developer will be too. I just feel like uninstalling VS 2010 now. This is so diappointing.

(As an aside, If Microsoft intends to go with a web-based approach to the Help System, I think they should go with HTML 5 rather than XHTML since no further work is being done on XHTML by W3C, as far as I know.)

spursfan

In reply to tbaxter

#Nov 14th @ 5:45 PM

Couldn't agree more - MS help has been awful on VS and Excel for ever - far too many search items returned in VS, little intelligence used, search in Excel can't even find words that aren't keywords, entirely for users who know what they're looking for

When you're in a hole, the best advice is to stop digging - just link F1 to do a Google search and join the real world - and focus on adding intelligent content that a decent search engine can find

hillr

One feature of DExplore I'm missing in the new help system (and MSDN online) is the "Sync with Table of Contents" button. Many times I'll do a search (or use the index) to find a .NET type and then I want to see the type in the context of the namespace it was defined in. That way I can quickly surf related types.