Scott's Blog

Fix for Help not working in May 2004 Community Technology Preview

Scott Swanson — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 23:37:00 GMT

After installing the May Community Technology Preview of Visual Studio 2005, you will quickly discover that the Help system does not work. You'll see a message that says, “Downloading...”

Rob Caron has posted a message on his Blog which explains how to fix the Help system.

http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2004/05/27/143485.aspx

TechEd 2004 in San Diego

Scott Swanson — Mon, 24 May 2004 07:09:00 GMT

I arrived in San Diego this afternoon for TechEd 2004. Today was the conference start. The main conference gets under way tomorrow; Monday May 24th and runs until Friday May 28. Many members of the Visual Studio Core Help and Community teams are here at the conference. We will be at the Developer Cabana as well as the Visual Studio IDE booths in the Exhibit Hall every day. We would very much like talk with anyone who has been using the Help system in the Visual Studio 2005 Community Technonogy Previews - or anyone who would like to talk about Visual Studio Help in general. This is a great opportunity to get your questions answered and give us your feedback in person!

The Visual Studio 2005 Help system offers new extensibilty mechanisms for those who wish to extend and customize the Visual Studio Help system. If you are at Tech Ed and would like to learn more about extending the Visual Studio 2005 Help system, find me at the booth. Or, you can email me directly at scottsw@microsoft.com to set up a specific meeting time.

Also, if you are attending TechEd, check out the nightly jam sessions. These run every night of the conference from 9:00pm to 1:00am. I stopped by tonight for a couple of hours and heard some very talented musicians playing lots of different music. If you play an instrument, hop on stage and join in. If you don't play, stop by to listen and support those who do. Its great fun!

How much Help content should Visual Studio install by default?

Scott Swanson — Wed, 05 May 2004 20:46:00 GMT

In Visual Studio Whidbey, the Help system will have the ability to perform a “scoped” install. Scoped install only installs content that is optimized for particular user types; Visual Basic developer, VC++ Developer, etc. Scoped install has the benefits of copying less content to your hard disk, reducing installation time, and removing potentially unneeded content from the Index and Table of Contents windows. On the down side, if you do a scoped install of Help content, its possible that later, if you add additional Visual Studio installation features, you might not have Help content installed for them. In that case, you would need to go back to MSDN setup and install the additional help content for the features you just installed. Is this a good thing? Is having a faster install time and reduced clutter in the Index and Table of contents a good trade off for not having all Visual Studio content on your machine?

Learn more about the Visual Studio 2005 (a.k.a Whidbey) Help System

Scott Swanson — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 18:42:00 GMT

Want to learn more about the new Help system in Visual Studio 2005? Check out my interviews with Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) on the cool new web site Channel9. New segments of the interview will be appearing over the coming weeks.

So far two segments have been posted:

-Scott

Whats with the weird keyboard navigation in the Help Index and Table of Contents tool windows?

Scott Swanson — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 00:39:00 GMT

Do you ever navigate the Index or Table of contents using the keyboard with just a little mouse clicking? If so, you might have noticed that the only way to keep the selection focus on an item in the Index or TOC is to first give focus to the tool window. You give focus the tool window by clicking on it's title bar, or <ctrl><alt><F1> for the Table of Contents or <ctrl><alt><F2> for the Index. Navigating the items in the tool windows is another story...

If you click on an item in the Index with your mouse, one of two things happens:

If the Index entry has multiple help topics, the Index Results tool window is opened, focus and selection are set to the first item in the Index Results list and the selected topic is shown. The user can then navigate the Index Results list using the up/down arrow keys.
If only a single help topic is associated with the Index entry, that topic is shown and focus is set to the topic window so you can navigate the topic using the arrow keys.

If you set focus to the Index window via <ctrl><alt><f2> the following behavior occurs:

Focus is set to the “Look For“ box by default. And you must hit <tab> twice to get to the Index list. We are fixing this in Whidbey. The filter combo will be moved to the top of the tool window out of the tab order so you can easily tab between the “Look For“ box and the Index list.
Now that you have tabbed to the Index list, you can move up/down the list via the arrow keys. To select and index entry, you press <enter> and are taken to the Index results list. As described above, focus is set to the first item in the Index Results list, and the associated topic is displayed.

This behavior has been in place since Visual Studio .NET 2002. The designers at the time thought that while this keyboard navigation was non-standard, it made the most sense for users navigating Help via the keyboard. Now that you've had two versions to use this model, what do you think? Should we change the behavior and keep the focus and select in the Index tool window, and force you to change windows in order to change focus? Or, is the auto focus switching a good thing that makes your lives easier?

If you click on an item in the Table of Contents, the topic you clicked on is displayed and focus is transferred to the topic window.
If you set focus to the TOC window using <ctrl><alt><F1> and then navigate the tree, you must press <enter> on a selected item to display that topic. Once you press <enter> the topic is loaded and focus is set to the topic.

This behavior has shipped for two versions now. Do you like the current behavior? If we changed the behavior in Whidbey to be the conventional focus/selection model rather than automatically changing focus to the topic, would this make your VS experience better or worse?

As we comb through Visual Studio looking for user model inconsistencies, questions such as this become very important. There is no automatic answer. If we leave things the way they are, then the Index and TOC navigation models will not be consistent with Windows and might confuse some users. However, now that we have shipped this behavior in two versions, it could be that people like this non-standard focus shifting model and find it beneficial.

The most important opinions on questions such as this is yours - the Visual Studio user.

Tell us what you think!

-Scott

How to fix Help Search in the March Community Technology Preview

Scott Swanson — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 18:26:00 GMT

People who attended VSLive and the Mobile Devices Conference in San Francisco two weeks ago received a copy of the Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) March Community Technology Preview. This Alpha release shipped with a configuration error that keeps local Help Search from working properly. I have posted an article here which explains how to fix this problem and enable local Help Search and F1 in this release. Note: this fix applies to the March Community Technology Preview only.

Have you tried the new help system in Whidbey?

Scott Swanson — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 06:33:00 GMT

It's been about 2 weeks now since we gave out the March Community Tech Preview of Visual Studio 2005 (a.k.a Whidbey) release at VS Live and the Mobile Devices Conferences in San Francisco. How many people have installed the bits and tried the new Whidbey Help system?

-Scott

The Mariners win their first game of the 2004 season!

Scott Swanson — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 06:17:00 GMT

You won't see me post a lot of non work related content to this Blog. But as a huge Seattle Mariners fan, I have to post a congratulations message to the Mariners for winning their first game of the 2004 season today against Oakland 9 to 4 in 10 innings. Yikes, going 0 and 5 is a scary way to start the season! Get all of the loosing out of your systems now...

Results of the screen resolution survey

Scott Swanson — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 06:08:00 GMT

Wow, last week was a busy week! I spent the beginning of the week attending much of the annual MVP Summit. And Thursday and Friday catching up from the beginning of the week. It was great to talk to so many MVPs from around the world and get their feedback on the Whidbey product. Several people sent me email asking when I'd be responding to posts on my Blog. Sorry for taking so long to do this. I haven't forgotten about you all.

After two weeks of responses to the question of screen resolution, I have collected and summarized the results in this article.

In summary:

147 people posted responses about 247 monitor configurations.
That averages out to approximately 1.7 monitors per person.

The most common resolutions were: 1280x1024, 1600x1200, 1024x768.

The most common monitor sizes were: 19”, 17”, 15”.

The next question is:

Multiple Monitors (a.k.a multi-mon). Are you using multiple monitors on the same machine?

A big Thank You to everyone who posts feedback! It's great to hear how people are using Visual Studio.

The pictures are fixed...

Scott Swanson — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 16:51:00 GMT

Thanks to Josh Ledgard, expert blogger, the pictures in my Help Toolbar post are now working properly. You no longer have to join the MSN community group where the pictures are located. Please take a look at the full screenshot of Whidbey Help and send me your comments.

-Scott

How do I view the Help pictures?

Scott Swanson — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 00:32:00 GMT

In order to make the screenshots available on the web, I created an MSN Community group and placed the images there. Thinking that by making the group open, everyone could access the images, I linked them to my blog page. It turns out I was wrong. Even though the group is open for all to join, you must first join before you can see the pictures.

Here is a link to the MSN Community called All About Help. Membership is open. Once you join, follow the documents link and you will find the images.

Stay tuned, I'll look into finding better place to post images online that doesn't require membership.

-Scott

What should the Help toolbar look like?

Scott Swanson — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 23:39:00 GMT

I'm in the process of designing, or should I say redesigning, the Help toolbar for Whidbey. In previous versions of Visual Studio, the Web toolbar was the Help toolbar. In Whidbey, we have a redesigned Help system with lots of new functionality. I think it's time the Help system had a toolbar that was optimized for getting and using Help, not just generic web browsing. Before I go too far and tell you what I think, I'd like to hear what you think about the Help toolbar.

Here are a few questions to keep in mind.

What do you like/dislike about the Web/Help toolbar in Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003?
Which features of Help do you use most often?
Do you use the toolbar to access Help features?

I've put numbers under each button so in case you aren't sure what that button is, you can tell me, “I have no idea what button 5 would do...” Don't worry if you haven't had a chance to use Whidbey yet. Tell me what you think anyway.

Unlike Office and Internet Explorer, Visual Studio has never used labels on our toolbars before. Do the labels help or hurt?

How does this picture compare to what you would like to see on the Help toolbar?

Here is a screen shot of the new Visual Studio Whidbey Help system. The screenshot is about 400k. So, to save those of you with limited bandwidth, I've linked to the image rather than displaying it on the page. This image puts the Help toolbar in context with the Whidbey Help experience.

Are the right Help commands there? If not, what would you put on the Help toolbar?

-Scott

Screen Resolution?

Scott Swanson — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 22:07:00 GMT

Over the past few days, several people on the VS Core team have gotten into a discussion regarding typical screen resolutions that people use when running Visual Studio. Its been about 18 months since the last formal customer survey was done. In that last survey, fully 30% of you, our customers, said that you run a screen resolution of 800x600. Is that still true? Tell me what resolution you run on your development machine. I'll compile the results of this informal survey and report back in a week or so...

-Scott

Welcome to my Blog

Scott Swanson — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 21:24:00 GMT

Hello, my name is Scott Swanson. I'm the Program Manager on the Visual Studio Core team who owns the Help experience. I work with Tim Sullivan, Saurabh Jain, Josh Ledgard and many other developers, writers and QA people to create the Visual Studio Help experience. What does it mean to own the “Help Experience“? It means bringing together all of the various pieces of technology that go into creating the Visual Studio Help system. At last count, there are six different teams in Microsoft who contribute technology or content to the Visual Studio help system. In the Whidbey release of Visual Studio, we have redesigned the help experience to make it easier to get answers to your questions... Tim did a great job of explaining the Whidbey Help design in his Blog.

In the coming days and weeks, I'll be posting pictures of the new help system designs and asking for your feedback to help us make the Whidbey Help experience the best it can possibly be. As the beta and community releases of Whidbey come out, this will be the place to find out what new help functionality has become available. If you'd like to see a preview of the new help system check out the developer tools road map on MSDN.