Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Come on readers - you can't tell me that only three people have something to say about the Visual Studio and MSDN library help system.  Come on - let me have it....really, we can take it...

- Tell me what you love

- Tell me what you hate

- Tell me what you use for getting unstuck in your work - from content, to features, from blogs to code sites

- Tell me about your dream assistance scenario

- Tell me about your most frustrating experience

- Tell me about the best help you ever found

- Tell me what you think about the MSDN wiki project

april

Published Thursday, July 27, 2006 7:17 AM by AprilR
Filed under:

Comment Notification

If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here

Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS

Comments

Thursday, July 27, 2006 10:29 AM by Martin Ritchie

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

I would like it to be integrated back in the UI like it was in Visual Studio 2002/2003.  It was great doing searches in the window of the ui, getting a dense list of results and searching there.  This separate application for help is much more cumbersome.

Also, I would like it to be smarter about the language filter.  Typically I program in C# an set the filter accordingly.  I like not having to scan through multiple examples to find the one in the right language.  But if there is no code example in C# I would like to see the VB code example or C++ code example if they exist.
Thursday, July 27, 2006 10:32 AM by AprilR

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Martin - Did you know that you can switch 2005 help back to internal/integrated? Just go to Tools->Options, select the Help Node under Environment, and change the drop down for "Show Help Using" to Integrated Help Viewer.  Interesting point on the language filters - thanks for posting.

april
Thursday, July 27, 2006 10:36 AM by kevin d. white

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

My frustration with your inability to manage help collections can be found at:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=509248&SiteID=1

and

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=563043&SiteID=1

As for MSDN Wiki...It won't be really useful until it's integrated with the rest of the documentation. See the download versions of the extended PHP docs since that is what you are trying to emulate anyway.
Thursday, July 27, 2006 10:47 AM by Wyatt

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

One of the things that bothers me, is that after you close help, it's process, dexplore.exe, is still alive until you close the process that launched it.
Thursday, July 27, 2006 11:17 AM by Stephen

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

I dread the load time required when i know I need help. It may be neccesary, but its still the reason i avoid pressing help until its my absolute last resort
Thursday, July 27, 2006 11:48 AM by thomas woelfer

# its far to slow

this happens quite often: i'm in the editor on some keyword and press f1. disk activity follows. much of it. when finally the help window is shown, i displays a page with a comment saying the help topic could not be found. pressing f1 again, the help topic will be shown.

i almost allways use google because they get me the relevant information faster than the locally installed help system can get it from my harddisk.

WM_FYI
thomas woelfer
Thursday, July 27, 2006 1:05 PM by jeffyjones

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Agreeing with others that it's just so damn slow. I mean, most of it essentially HTML, so what's the problem?
Thursday, July 27, 2006 1:12 PM by Jeff Parker

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Well what I love is Dynamic help. When basically you are working with the .net framework and you have dynamic help on the side with quick links that saves a great deal of time. I do love this feature.

One of the biggest complaints I have though would be on searching would be misclassfied docs and so on. Like take for example the keyword for C# "class". Set your filters to C# only, Technology All, and Content Type all. The First thing returned is class statement for JScript, and Yes I have my search filter set for C# Only. C# Class comes up second which actually suprises me, then the Visual Basic scripting edition class statement, wait didn't I already say I had my filter set to C# only. There are a lot of docs in there like this misclassified or coming back in languages that I checked not to search on. Also looking through the list you get a whole ton of items from the platform SDK. Even though I specified C# only. Actually the Platform SDK is such a huge beast of burdon and I find it gets in the way of most things and also contains a huge amount of the eronious search results but there is no way to turn off the platform SDK. In all honesty for day to day programming in .net I very rarely need to reference the platforms SDK only if I am researching something so it would be nice to shut it off.  The other thing as you browse through you actully get returned every single class object in the .net framework. Why because it says .NET Framework "Class" Library on every page in there ;-) So sometimes search is just a little too litteral.

The other thing which I do not understand why MS in general has had such a diffult time with as of lately in all new apps, proxy servers. We use a Microsoft Proxy server, same one for over 5 years, so yes windows 2000 server. If the proxy server isn't broke why fix it. Well MSN messenger pre .net would work through it. After MSN messenger went .net it wouldn't work, live messenger doesn't work through it either, and well you guessed it MSDN online help search on the web doesn't work either. Yet the start page in VS 2005 and any requests VS 2005 makes out through the proxy works just fine. Go figure. Now I will say this though, the new search ingine on msdn.microsoft.com seems to be working quite well. Still gets some eronious results but way better than it ever was before. It was useless before. MSDN search on my desktop is not useless, and far from it. I had often wondered why MSDN online was so bad, if they only use the same search engine they had on the desktop. However, now the MSDN online one is better than the desktop one. However I have faith in you guys to fix it.
Thursday, July 27, 2006 1:16 PM by Nathan Swenson

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

I agree whole heartedly that Help is death slow to load! I cringe when I press F1.


Thursday, July 27, 2006 1:18 PM by Jeff Parker

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Oh yeah and Wyatt Make a very good point if I may quote him "One of the things that bothers me, is that after you close help, it's process, dexplore.exe, is still alive until you close the process that launched it."

Also the others that say it is slow, well yeah there is that problem as well but I figured you guys knew that. And in all fairness I know the MSDN library is huge.

And one more thing there does not seem to either be a way to add new Technologies, or Content Types either that or several SDK's are not adding them. Sometimes I would like to just narrow my search to Sharepoint and Sharepoint only. Of right to a specific SDK.
Thursday, July 27, 2006 1:22 PM by Jay R. Wren

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

I hate the speed.  I don't know if it is the format of the documentation from 1.1 to 2.0 or what, but the Visual Studio Documentation I entirely avoid.  I'll get such information by searching google.

I install the 2.0 SDK just to get the 2.0 SDK documentation which performs poorly still, but better than the bloated visual studio documentation.

My first stop shop for documentation is the old 1.1 SDK documentation.  I install the 1.1 SDK just for the documentation.  It is the only reference document which I find performs acceptable.

Could it be that starting dexplore causes many files to be written?  Virus Scanners generally analyze all files which are written so maybe this is what is slowing me down?  Either way, disabling mcafee is not an option for me.  My IT dept. frowns on it greatly.

Another gripe:  I'd like to see full on article style examples of how to use certain popular components.  e.g.  Repeater Control, DataGridView in ASP.NET.   The documentation is good for a reference, but I should be able to learn new things offline, without having to reference http://www.asp.net   The same is true for windows forms.  And when I say "article style" I mean just that.  Don't just point to an example implementation, I know those are there, but studying them is often far more time consuming than reading a nice article.  Maybe said articles do exist, but are in the MSDN documentation which I called "visual studio" documentation above.  If the articles are there, then it sounds like I'm missing out because I find the performance of the documentation browser unacceptable.
Thursday, July 27, 2006 1:56 PM by Shahar

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

I stopped using MSDN local help completely.

It is SO freaking slow. SOOOOO SLOW. On a dual-core 3ghz machine. Just makes no sense what so ever.

Using msn search with site:msdn2.microsoft.com works much better for me.

Also, the tools for searching stuff like templates are completely useless. Used them a dozen times and have not been able to get any meaningful results so far. Why do we even have them there?
Thursday, July 27, 2006 4:31 PM by Dave

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

The best help for me is code examples.
Friday, July 28, 2006 12:33 AM by Phaeron

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

What I love:
* Support for online help integration. Great for when you can't install local help.
* The new filtering UI, which is much more direct and easier to use than the old expression filter (since when is NOT a binary operator?).

What I hate:
* VS2005 help is slooooowww. I think it's disk traffic, because on a cold start it can easily take 10-20 seconds to appear with nothing showing up until the end. It's probably worse in my case because I have the PSDK and DXSDKs installed.
* Different languages and technologies keep stepping on each other. If I hit F1 on MessageBox in Win32 code in a C++ project with no CLR support, I get the .NET Framework function. On AddRef, I get IXACTEngine::AddRef from the DirectX SDK. ARGGH!
* The new search results formatting is way too bloated.

What I use for getting unstuck:
Google.

Dream assistance scenario:
I want to see a bunch of user comments at the bottom with extra gotchas and hints, like in the online PHP manual.

What I think about the MSDN wiki:
I question whether it will scale, given the problems that Wikipedia is having with articles that simply turn to mush over time due to excessive revision. Also, I wish it covered the Platform SDK too.
Friday, July 28, 2006 5:39 AM by Radeldudel

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

There is a help system?
I just google for whatever I need to know. Especially good are the google groups (usenet), since I see others who had the same problem and how they solved it.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006 6:07 PM by legolas

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

I still use vc6, and a bit of vc2003, so I doubt my comments will have much relevance. vc6 help does only take a second or 5 to start however!
In vc6, the STL help is pretty much useless (because of the lack of content). Other than that, I use google which takes me to msdn usually (for win32 functions anyway), where pretty much everything is explained well (a BIG bonus over programming for OSX by the way, where everything is either not documented, or badly documented).

My only gripe on msdn are the examples: they are usually only available by download. Generally, I'm not really looking for a working program that I can compile, but for a snippet that will show how to use something. I don't mind the whole program around it, but you can put code directly on a webpage you know... Look at some doxygen output if wou need to be convinced of that ;-)
Tuesday, August 01, 2006 6:15 PM by legolas

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Oh and if anything could be added to your documentation, it's things like what Raymond Chen & Michael Kaplan do on their blog (many of their posts could be used direclty in fact): short pieces covering certain topics. (Note: NOT downloadable whitepapers in .doc format like some of the IT things. Those are a complete disaster, this is a website. Make them available in .doc also if you like that, but put the content on the website!! Also, whitepapers tend to get looong and marketing-like.)

These things would have to be well integrated (linked to and from relevant help pages about at least) with the current msdn help to be found and to be useful.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006 3:19 PM by AprilR

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Thank you ALL for your great comments. I'm rolling them up for our work teams here and really appreciate you taking time to reply.

april
Saturday, August 19, 2006 4:08 AM by Vyacheslav Lanovets

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

I have some

1. First of all, I have to use google instead of local copy of MSDN.
I am working on projects written in C#/.Net and in unmanaged C++/Win32 SIMULTANEOUSLY.
It's a pain switching search options between .Net and Unmanaged C++ for Smart Devices.
And changing current subset ("Filtered By") is slooow.

MSDN is only 1.6 Gb, Google indexed base is "a little" larger but it works perfectly even without any "subsets".
And it's faster than local search!!!

I will be satisfied though if MSDN just remembers 10-15 last Search Filter _combinations_ and let me select them from the combobox just under the search string input.


2. I _always_ use a button "sync with contents" to find other documents on the subject of the article found via index/search. For many articles this button is not available. For instance LVS_EX_SUBITEMIMAGES is in index but corresponding "Extended List-View Styles" article is not in the contents.


3. The help IDE is important, but the problem is that the documentation in this IDE is useless most of the time.
There are common typical errors programmers do, so why don't list them? It is done pretty well in Platfrom SDK help for kernel objects.

But let's take, for instance, help for "ListCtrl::SetImageList". It says that this function "Assigns an image list to a list view control." ?? :)
What help writers should have done is to mention LVS_SHAREIMAGELISTS style here in Remarks section!
Moreover, it is not written anything about tab controls behaviour in this particular situation (But MS App verifier says that it should :) ).
I remember help for Borland Delphi 3.0. It was really cool. For each function of VCL it had several typical problems listed! I only had to press Ctrl-F1 and 99% of time I was getting an answer at once.

.Net help is even worse. I won't even comment on it because even thinking about it makes me feeling bad.

Rather often I find in google the MS KB article saying that MS confirmed smth to be a BUG. But then the links to this KBs _MUST_ be added to ALL MSDN articles describing this feature, esp. if KBs have workaround recommendation.


4. Really Annoying Thing: for instance, if I press F1 on CMyDialog::OnInitDialog(); I get "Information Not Found" result. And I have to go to index input field and delete "CMyDialog::" to find the description for OnInitDialog. MSDN must do it itself if the information is not found after the first attempt with full string.


Saturday, August 19, 2006 4:44 AM by Vyacheslav Lanovets

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

About examples. Examples are bad or very straightforward. Sometimes examples give sort of bad advice.

For instance

Standard C++ Library Reference  
mem_fun  

Nobody writes
"for_each(v1.begin(), v1.end(), mem_fun<int, StoreVals>(&StoreVals::squareval));   "

It's enough to write
"for_each(v1.begin(), v1.end(), mem_fun(&StoreVals::squareval));   "



Another example of poor documentation:
.Net Array.Length property
"Gets a 32-bit integer that represents the total number of elements in all the dimensions of the Array. "

If I had written it I would have added smth like "Remarks: Use GetLength method to get the number of elements in each particular dimension of the Array". It's simple but very helpful.



I liked idea of Wiki. It's going to be helpful in the future.
Saturday, August 19, 2006 9:07 AM by Andrew McDonald

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

I'll chip in on the speed complaints. Online help  takes ages to open, it just sits there for up to a minute saying

"Loading Online Help...

Internet connectivity issues can slow down Online Help access. You can set your preference for loading Help by selecting Options from the Tools menu and navigating to the /Help/Online pane."

What internet connectivity issues? I can open IE and go to a URL in an instant, but VS sits there with no network activity at all for ages.

Then it goes to the wrong thing anyway! Pressing F1 on a call to the Win32 function GetOpenFileName correctly goes to the platform SDK documentation under local help, but I just tried with online help and it took me to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.excel.applicationclass.getopenfilename.aspx, which has nothing to do with what I wanted.

Secondly there's search being awkard to use. As  Jeff said, some SDKs don't add themselves to the technology list. Previously the filter was the same between index and search, but with VS2005 they're separate. I usually want to search only the Xbox 360 SDK, but there's lots of noise in the results.

There's also an irritating bug with colour schemes, which I reported here:
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=105539

Apparently it'll get fixed, but it wasn't clear if that would be in the service pack when it eventually arrives. I hope it is, unreadable text doesn't give the impression of a professional product!

Document formatting inconsistency is bad too, the Win32 docs are in a totally different style to the rest and each thing I look up has a different layout to the last.

I also think there should be more code examples; all but the most basic of functions could use a tiny example at the bottom of the page to explain its purpose and demonstrate error checking.
Sunday, February 10, 2008 1:04 PM by Ben

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Search by topic!

What I mean is to be able to search by any of these combiniations: ASP.NET, C#, WinForms, WPF, and by any number of namespaces etc...

The search narrow now doesn't work like this.

Saturday, June 07, 2008 8:33 AM by Relationship Compatibility

# AprilR's WebLog : VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

Come on readers - you can't tell me that only three people have something to say about the Visual Studio and MSDN library help system. Come on - let me have it....really, we can take it... - Tell me what you love - Tell me what you hate - Tell me wha

Thursday, February 26, 2009 5:16 AM by MK2k

# re: VS and MSDN Help Are Totally Perfect?

The best documentation I saw was the Qt Documentation, please have a look and learn from it :)

Leave a Comment

(required) 
required 
(required) 

  
Enter Code Here: Required
 
Page view tracker