Hey, what's that there? When you hit F1 or go to the Help menu and select Visual Studio Product Documentation, you get....no longer DExplorer, you get your web browser opening to MSDN online! While there is no offline help, for Beta 1, we will be providing it in the next Beta. In the short term, you can essentially get a sneak peek at the new offline view by switching on the new 'low-bandwidth' (loband, we call it) view in the MSDN library. We are looking for your feedback on the level and quality of functionality you find there! We'll post more about the low-bandwidth story later.
What else is happening in Beta 1? Here are some good sources for you:
A great long post on all the goodness packed into this release is on Jason Zander's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/18/announcing-vs2010-net-framework-4-0-beta-1.aspx
Rico Mariani's blog talks about some of the improvements he worked on (including help!):
http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-10-your-performance-feedback-plus-beta-1.aspx
Daniel Ferndandez's blog has a great cheat sheet:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-2010-beta-1-cheat-sheet.aspx
What can we say about the full help story coming in Beta 2? I talked with Terry Clancy about this, and he created this great summary below. I want to add that other vendors such as Helpware and Madcap are also keeping tabs on our work to make sure they can support their customers as well!
Visual Studio Help
Visual Studio 10 will come with a completely re-engineered Help system that introduces a new flexible, standards based Help framework which will ultimately be used in other products beyond Visual Studio. Help3 is a help system replacement for Microsoft Help 2.x . This new help system will be easier to produce content for, and will interfere less with Visual Studio itself. The standards based approach delivers not only a much better local experience but also a seamless transition to an online web browser and with infrastructure and tooling much more consistent other Visual Studio and internet technologies.
Visual Studio 2008 and prior versions use a proprietary help system in which content was normally packaged into .hxs or .chm file formats. With VS2010 these formats will go away and moving forward help content will be stored primarily XHTML, will be packaged into Zip-format containers. These containers will be based on the PKZip format. These containers can conceivably hold any type of content, from HTML to XML, from art to videos. The containers will have a special file extension (.mshc – Microsoft Help Content Container). Specific XML tags are used to control the behavior of the Help system. For example special tags are used to define “Contents” hierarchy and “Index” listings and “F1” help behavior. Viewers will access a specific topic through a URI provider using a standards protocol being defined for the purpose.
The primary Visual Studio 2010 help viewer will be a web browser (for either local or remote use). At some stage third party viewers applications will also be supported but this may not be a supported scenario in the VS2010 release.
The new help system uses a custom full text search engine to index the VS (and partners’) help content providing a best of breed search speed and experience
The new storage architecture enables many new rich scenarios. For example, VSIP partners can now add new containers of content to designated locations and have those tied to product content through the properties. Partner pages can be created as children of pages that are part of the standard Visual Studio help, thus they would then appear in the Help content tree under the standard Visual Studio pages.
The main implication for partners that extend Visual Studio is the need to migrate any help documentation and content to the work with the new Visual Studio help. Microsoft is working with Help Authoring product companies such as Component One (Doc2Help) and Innovasys (Help Studio) to work towards their support of this new format as soon as possible.
In the first version of this new help system, all APIs will be marked as internal and thus they can not be uses as extensibility points. In later versions of this software we plan to mark specific APIs as external to expose then as extensibility points for partners.
Stay tuned!
- AprilR