Windows 8 – My 2c

September 22nd, 2011

икони цени

So MS couldn’t ignore the IPad success and now they are betting on a new “reimagined” OS. The Build attendees got a nice new Samsung incentive to start building the future. Success will depend on cheap hardware becoming available and cool apps appearing.

People already spend their money on $700 IPhones & iPads, and on $2000+ all-singing all-dancing PCs (Gaming; Video editing; Development; Business; etc etc etc). Is there money left over for consumers to buy yet another $800 device?

Corporations will switch OFF WinRT for a vast number of PCs. Maybe in time personal Win8/metro slates will help business with: Taking Notes/Check Meetings & Emails/AudioChat/VideoChat/etc. Currently iPad is slow to move into the corporate space. iPhone is well entrenched into many corporations.

Consumers will like Metro. Corporations/Developers/Gamers will want the traditional Windows UI but will appreciate the Metro UI is also available in Windows 8.

Is Metro useful to our business? I think WPF is still our main choice for the future. For Kiosk apps; Portable devices; Monitoring and viewing device results (in Browser\ Email\ Dedicated Metro app)… then Metro will be nice (we already have the tools and know C#/Blend etc). We will eventually build new portable devices with simple metro interfaces. So the majority of our products will be remain PC, but there is space to write smaller Utilities in Metro and for IPad.

There was also some nice improvements for Windows PCs…
Steven Sinofsky mentioned that Windows 8…

  • uses less memory/less Power; faster boot & shutdown;
  • better performance; better security. better touch. better USB3 support.
  • Hyper-V Client included (but requires CPU with SLAT for smoother video)
  • Easier boot from VHD (VMs have access to hardware & performance)
  • Win7 could boot from a 2 TB drive. Win8 can boot from a 256TB drive.
  • Metro needs 1024×768; 1366×768 for full side-by-side experience.
  • Supports -3 axis accellerometer / Magnetrometer / Gyro
  • Support for NFC Antenna hardware
  • Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)+SSD for fastest startup/shutdown
  • Copy – All copy jobs on one screen. Ability to pause jobs & show performance.
  • Explorer: A ribbon UI (can be rolled up and ignored like normal ribbons).
  • Photo login (visual touch/mouse login type password)
  • All Microsoft inhouse PC hardware tests can now be downloaded.
  • Better dual monitor control – Which apps run where; etc
  • New Task manager etc etc etc

Rob

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FAR HTML 5.3 Now Available

September 18th, 2011

????????Folks we have just released FAR HTML 5.3

This is a minor release so a free update to all 5.x licensed users. Just install over the old version.
Many great improvements including:

  • FAR can now access extra memory — +1GB on Windows 32-bit, +2 GB on Windows 64-bit (thanks Pierre le Riche for FastMM which is compatible with the Windows extended memory compiler switch /LargeAddressAware).
  • Win 7 SP1 compatibility.
  • Search File Names (see below).
  • Google Translated help.
  • etc…

Get the Update

Search File Names

There are lots of little fixes and improvements but one of our favorites is “Commands > Search File Names” (also available via “Search” button in the tool bar).

This is really useful command given that Windows Search is so lame in Vista and Windows 7.

In the screen shot below I have scanned my entire C: Drive and found around 1/2 million files. The new search dialog is open (Ctrl+Shift+F), and as I type in the text “fastforward” the entire 1/2 million items quickly reduces to show the 9 final matches. We have also done work on optimizing .FAR file load time — We saved all these files to a .FAR list and they reloaded in under 2 seconds on the laptop.
Enjoy — Rob

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Windows 8 Developer Preview under VMware

September 15th, 2011

A number of developers have been struggling to install the Win 8 Preview .ISO as a VM.

The trick seems to be to create a Windows 7 (32-bit or 64-bit) VM and select “I will install the operating system later.” Attach the Win 8 .ISO as an optical drive and restart the VM. The Win 8 bits should install OK.  The VM Tools will now install OK as well. I’m using VMware Workstation 8.0. Not sure if VM 7.0 is suitable.

The trick for installing came from here. Thanks Ron!

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MS Help Viewer 2.0

September 15th, 2011

Those checking out the new developer preview bits (Beta releases of both Visual Studio 11 & Windows 8) may notice some changes in help.

Jeff Braaten [MSFT] has all the detail for you here…

http://thirdblogfromthesun.com/2011/09/announcing-microsoft-help-viewer-2-0-developer-preview/

Paul O’Rear also posted these notes…

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/thehelpguy/archive/2011/09/15/help-viewer-2-0-visual-studio-11-windows-8-developer-preview.aspx

To summarizing:

  • Help Viewer 1.1 has been super seeded by Help Viewer 2.0 in VS 11.
  • Windows 8 help is using the same help engine (HV 2.0) but their own UI.
  • The Agent tray application is gone. There is now a COM interface to access the Help Viewer API.
  • Content filtering is still in the pipe and we will see this in a later release.
  • Help Library Manager app has been completely revamped and integrated into the Help Viewer.
  • Can now move the data store.
  • Can now connect to any download source (so a company could host their own MSDN download source).
  • New downloader is smarter. Can recover and continue if interrupted.

H3Viewer – Our own Help Viewer replacement H3Viewer is currently not compatible with VS 11 and Win 8 help. This is because it still uses the HelpLibAgent.exe interface. In time we will update.

Congratulation to the help team on reaching this significant milestone.

== Screen shots ==

Remember this a preview and the some features will change.

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Windows 8 Developer Preview

September 15th, 2011

Yesterday was very exciting for the developer community. Microsoft released details of Windows 8 at the Build 2011 (formally PDC) developer conference. The new features and improvements to Windows 8 are too numerous to list. But I took these notes as I listened to the 2.5hr keynote if you are interested:  My notes from Build 2011 Keynote.

You can download a developer preview of Win8 here:

There is an Win8 ISO image that contains VS 2011 (contains the new Metro Style controls), or you can download the VS 11 preview separately:

Info on VS 11 preview:

All Metro style Forums (Thanks Lisa): http://forums.dev.windows.com

  1. UI Design for Metro style apps
  2. Tailoring your Metro style app for hardware and devices
  3. Building Metro style apps with HTML5
  4. Building Metro style apps with C++
  5. Building Metro style apps with C# or VB
  6. Building Metro style games with DirectX
  7. Tools for Metro style apps
  8. Windows Developer Preview: General OS questions

 

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What if MSDN Library had Books?

September 1st, 2011

иконографияWhenever I talk to the Microsoft LEX team (VS & MSDN help), I come away staggered at the scale they operate on. The MSDN site is one of the biggest websites in the world and supports many different online languages.  They are always working hard on the next big thing to make it easier for customers to find stuff.  These guys love customer feedback. So here’s my latest…

The following thoughts have been buzzing around in my head for some time crystallizing and I wanted to write them down.

IMHO I think MSDN Library has grown rapidly and needs a radical overhaul.

One solution…. Develop the Book view.

  1. Slice up MSDN Library into books (same as a real library) – At the moment we have more a sea of single topics loosely held in context by links and an enormous TOC. The UX would be much enhanced and by a book view.
  2. The nightly build should generate a .mshc file for every MSDN library book, and make them all available for download (by web and HLM).
    Many users are currently frustrated that only a small proportion of MSDN Library is available offline. The download should be available from the online book cover page (a more logical place for some than Help Library Manager app).
    Also generate a PDF of the book for printing and devices without Help Viewer. Personally I don’t think I have a use for building my own PDFs from selected individual pages.
  3. Allow the user to scope down to the Book level (TOC/Index/Search just for a particular book — Online or Offline). More natural. Easier to find content in the book. Less clutter.
  4. The high-level view of MSDN Library should be more book oriented (like a real library or Amazon) with color coded mock up book cover panels. Scope down to get TOC/Index experience of today.
  5. Discontinue the old complex “filtering” idea of VS 200x local help… and filtering on strange boundaries such as “Concepts”. Complex tagging of individual pages was never fully successful.
    Just keep it simple. Stick to Books with nice logical boundaries.
    I just want to easily find and scope down to a logical book. I can find everything easily from there (concepts, HowTos, API Ref etc), as long as it is properly organized and sign posted.
  6. Group related books into “book stacks” (like a predefined book shelf). I should also be able to scope down to the book stack level. And I should be able to defined my own stack (book shelf).
  7. The Online/Offline experience should be similar and tightly linked. The offline viewer: At any time I should be able to update my “MSDN book list” to match the online list. I should be able to get a nice visual representation of all the MSDN books [Books I don’t have yet as ghosted; Books with updates available clearly marked; Book covers color coded by technology].

As a developer I typically spend my whole day inside one reference book (online or offline).
I don’t want to see other books (unless I choose to scope up or do a wider Bing search).

The current experience is OK. But I suggest it could be much better by adding a book view.

Thanks

Rob

 

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VS 2010 Help … Thoughts

July 15th, 2011

иконографияикониJust jotting down some thoughts. VS 2010 SP1 Help is much improved but there is still much to do. Here are some thought that came out in the forums today…

 

So you may not know that with the VS 2011 SP1 release they brought back the standalone viewer (full TOC, full Index, favs etc).

The RTM help received such a flood of bad reviews that, to the credit of the help team, they quickly reinstated the standard viewer app.

The browser based help idea just didn’t go down well with customers.

 

Moving forward..

There is still work to do with the SP1 viewer. These problems remain…

  • A help system of this size must have filtering.
    My idea is… Nothing too complicated. Just tag all pages of each book with the bookName, Locale and Version.
    At the moment we take a new book, rip out all the pages and throw them in to the huge soup of single pages. Not a great experience,
  • They need to reorganize the book version tagging and TOC Sync.
    At the moment when you search you find 6 versions of the same thing.
    But the TOC only has VS 2010 related help so a TOC Sync wont always work.
  • Books you download often parent into another book. If that other book does not exist it wont show in the master TOC.
    They need a way to dynamically add orphaned books to the TOC.
  • Rich media. HTML is able to host rich content but currently VS 2010 help blocks Flash, video, links to PDF … everything.
    We need a safe way to register local media associated with a help book (like Adobe do with Flash).
    The easiest way is to register media associated with your help during install when elevated in admin mode.
  • The help registration signing system is over the top and duplication.
    Windows already has a way to securely install components. We install, we get challenged, we except the challenge and installation continues in an elevated (admin) context. To reinvent another layer of protection is just annoying & confusing to developers and customers.
    One challenge is enough in installing content.

I think the MS standard help configuration still works well. Most companies creating help today offer TOC, Index & Bookmarking system and customers are happy.

CHMs work but we need a new help system which

  1. supports Unicode
  2. is scalable
  3. is open with a rich API (so we can embed help in apps and do background lookups etc).

The VS 2010 help actually ticks all these boxes. But the help system still needs to mature (ie. see top list above).

I am so wrapped with #3 the open API side of HV 1.x. If you haven’t tried our H3Viewer yet then please do so. It was very straight forward to build this alternate viewer using the new VS 2010 help engine.

With the web, we have to rely on search.. But the web is broken in to web sites and these can be searched independently (filtering) and often have their own navigation systems (filtering). At the moment MSDN is (as I said) mostly a large soup of single pages (with only some TOC structure holding them in relationship).

Rob

 

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Posted in Microsoft, MS Help 3.x | 1 Comment »

Move or Reset your VS 2010 help Library

April 29th, 2011

мека мебелHelp Viewer 1.x (VS 2010 help) does not yet officially support moving your local help library, however it’s easy to do (if you are comfortable tweaking the registry and editing files in the protected area of your hard disk… Which most developers are).

Read the article:

Enjoy
Rob

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Visual Studio SP1 Help rant

April 8th, 2011

Did you know that VS 2010 Service Pack 1 is now available and has a brand new help viewer?

<rant>

There were a lot of angry responses to the VS 2010 RTM help. In particular the way it displayed help in a browser and did not provide a full TOC, full Index or bookmark support.

I think everyone was quite taken aback by the huge negative response to the RTM help.  Not many people know this, but the help team were well on track to delivering a full traditional Help Viewer experience. It was quite late in development when someone made the suggestion to deliver help in the browser.  The idea was appealing. There had been complaints in the past that documentation was locked into Microsoft technology (eg. in HTML Help we had only one viewer which was built around the Internet Explorer browser and ActiveX). So I can see how this idea of “an Open Help Platform” would look attractive. The mistake was introducing a radical change during the final stage of the project, without talking to their customers.

Please show the help team some love.  I’m sure they will remember this painful lesson for some time to come.

</rant>

OK enough ranting.  The Service Pack 1 is now out and does deliver several improvements that customers were asking for:

  • A dedicated viewer done in C# and WPF.
  • Full TOC.
  • Full Index.
  • Full bookmark support.
  • Fast and responsive. Accurate F1.

The following are on the radar and should be fixed in the next wave

  • F1 help for C++ projects (currently not so accurate I hear).
  • Content filtering (MS know this is important to customers but tell them again anyway).

Also we have these improvements

  • Faster merge times than DExplore.
  • Merge no longer locks up Visual Studio as it did in DExplore (VS 2002/2003/2005/2008).
  • Help application is independent of Visual Studio. This will become important as we move forward.
  • A Help SDK. All past MS Help systems were closed to programmers.
  • Alternative viewers. I’ve published H3Viewer which offers some extra features. I’m sure in time there will be more.

Please try VS SP1 help and see what you think.
IMHO the help team have done a great job in responding to feedback. And filters I know are still high up on the To Do list.

If you still have concerns about help. The help team are very open to receiving direct feedback.
They do respond to all serious posts to their blogs. You can leave a public comment under
an appropriate blog entry or click the link that says “Email me”.

Rob (moving forward)

 

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VS SP1 and new Help Viewer, are now available

March 10th, 2011

Hi all
In case you missed it….

VS SP1 is now available for download from MSDN Subscriber downloads and tomorrow as a public download. VS SP1 contains the new VS local Help Viewer. So no more browser based help. No more testing in all browser for compatibility.
http://thirdblogfromthesun.com/2011/03/new-local-help-viewer-available-in-visual-studio-2010-sp1/

Side Note: The latest H3Viewer.exe is compatible with the new help system and still contains several extra features.

Rob

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Say No to GM in Australia

December 20th, 2010

Steve Marsh, a WA organic grower, says: “GM canola can’t be contained. We rely on the premium for GM-free organic food and we need Farmer Protection laws. We want compensation for lost premiums and cancelled certification.”

Kevin Willmott, a Victorian farmer who grew GM canola this year, says: “I’ve got 100 tonnes of GM canola that germinated in the pods when it was still green. GM is the problem because my conventional canola was fine. We’ll never grow GM again.”

Monsanto wants to make Australia the first country to develop and grow GM wheat – our daily bread and pasta. It recently acquired 20% of WA’s public breeding program for this purpose. Gene Ethics is working hard to stop industry and government research, development and promotion of GM crops and animals, particularly wheat. Your generous financial support will help to oppose the GM companies and their backers that use shaky science to sell shonky products.

Please donate to Gene Ethics, now:
at: http://www.geneethics.org/donate

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New Help Viewer for VS 2010

October 28th, 2010

кухненско обзавежданеMicrosoft announced today plans to address issues with VS 2010 offline help viewer.

Jeff Bratten’s blog articles tells you all about it.

As part of the announcement Paul O’Rear has provided a video tour of a new offline help viewer due to be released with VS 2010 SP1.

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www.KayeHarrison.com

September 13th, 2010

Just finished building a web site for Australian singer, songwriter Kaye Harrison. Kaye is a great talent, and great ambassador for God.

www.kayeharrison.com/

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How to fix MSDN Help

September 1st, 2010

My hobby horse

The worst thing about MSDN help is it’s so freak’n big. Search brings up useless stuff from everywhere, and so does the Index. Only the TOC allows you to explore just a specific area.  That’s why users love the TOC.

For years MS have tried to apply the Google search experience to MS Help without much success. Users are still unhappy. Why? Simple… With a web search you are exploring a gigantic universe (similar to MSDN). Search results deliver some possibilities and you eventually end up in a smaller universe called a website. A book library is a similar experience.

With a website (or book) you are in a closed system where navigation, search, index (whatever the site gives you) allows you to quickly find things in a limited scope. But with MSDN you never escape this large freak’n big universe … search, Index and TOC are always full scope. Users need to be able to shrink the world down.

MSDN Library “online” has the same problem. For example: If I go to say UI Guidelines section of MSDN  Library I’m in the area I want to be in. Yet to my great frustration… I can’t search just that area or book.  Imagine a traditional library. After using search to find the book you want, you sit down and enjoy the smaller world of that book. But with MSDN you can never change scope. Only the TOC gives you some brief relief.

Imagine if the web had no logical boundaries. No websites. Just millions of pages. That’s the horrible experience we get from MSDN.

If MS followed the web or library experience (and not so much the Google experience), then MSDN would be a great experience.  MS Help 2 was heading in the right direction with filters, but despite several attempts to rework the tags the system just never worked to any ones satisfaction.

In the web we can scope down to the website level. In MSDN we also need to be able to scope down to the book level. To easily flip between full MSDN and a book experience. Not by using millions of topic level tags (as in MS Help 2). Just tag your books, and let the pages inherit those tags.

It really is that simple. No more playing with tag clouds, lets get this right.

As much as the help team think they can solve this problem using data logic and tagging (like sorting different sized marbles), all they really need to do is let us find the relevant book. Then it’s up to the MS word-smiths to craft easy to navigate books.

Question 8.

How about ‘location’ or some other type of general content grouping metadata — for example that a certain result comes from the Visual C# documentation, or from the Windows SDK. Do you find that sort of additional data when viewing search results useful?

No.

Question 9.

How important is the ability to scope search results based on topic types, or code language?

We don’t want complicated tagging. We never get this right. You already have content organized into books — Just let me see the book boundaries in the help and let me narrow my scope to one or more books.

Summary

Help is really simple. I want to find a book. Then scope down and explore just that book or related books. MSDN has quickly grown into a monster and there is no easy mechanism to scope down to just a book. Forget filters. Let me see the books in MSDN and create book shelves that I can live in without seeing the other irrelevent 99% of MSDN.

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Posted in Microsoft, MS Help | 2 Comments »

FAR 5.1 Now Available

July 17th, 2010

We are pleased to release FAR 5.1

This is a minor update. It fixes some small annoying problems such as buttons not repainting (disappearing) when the Alt key is pressed.

BTW I’ve also uploaded 5.1 to Visual Studio Gallery.

It would help us  a lot if you could go to the FAR VS Gallery page and leave a rating and\or a review. Thanks in advance.

Thanks for supporting FAR

Rob

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Helpware need You

July 12th, 2010

In 2009  Microsoft launch the Visual Studio Gallery, where the community could upload & download tools and extensions for Visual Studio. VS 2010 even has a built-in gallery viewer. VS Gallery is already a great success.

Visual Studio Gallery

Being all VS related products, we’ve added all our Helpware tools to the VS Gallery.

If you use a Helpware product it would be a great help if you could rate and\or review the products on the VS Gallery site. Many thanks to those who have already helped out!

Also, we are trying to translate the GUI of our free app H3Viewer (for viewing VS 2010 help). It’s not a big job (200 short strings). If you can help translate to a language we would be very grateful (free FAR HTML 5 licenses are on offer).

Thanks in advance.
Rob

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Health and the Hookworm

June 20th, 2010

This year there has been a lot interest in using hookworms to boost the immune system and fix everything from severe allergies to MS. One clinic claims that  everyone of their MS patients are in remission. The thinking is that in the west we have over done it with hygiene and our immune systems need a little more dirt to stay challenged and healthy. A small does of 20-70 hook worms seems to provide that challenge.

Here are a collection of interviews and articles from the ABC (Australian TV and Radio)

ABC – Philip Adams (mp3)

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2010/2883972.htm

ABC – Science Show – Parasites by RadioLab (mp3)

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2010/2883972.htm

ABC – Catalyst (video)

http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2823795.htm

ABC  (article)

http://abc.gov.au/science/articles/2001/11/02/406170.htm

CBS TV (video)

http://wcbstv.com/watercooler/hookworm.treatment.therapy.2.1015550.html

Discover Magazine (article)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2009/07/22/are-hookworms-the-next-claritin/

Philip Adams radio Interview with Jasper Lawrence (AIT)

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2010/2883972.htm

—

Some Links:

–

Companies offering Helminth Therapy

WormTherapy have a slightly different approach than AIT.  Start off on 25 worm dose (since most of the worlds population are infected by 25-50 worms. And having too many worms will leach out too many nutrients).  Both guarantee infection for 3 years.

User blogs

–

More Information

Australia & Hookworm

http://iceh.uws.edu.au/fact_sheets/FS_hookworm.html — Australia’s northern problem seems to be dog hookworm. Unwormed dogs in northern communities infecting the soil. There are some studies around looking at using canine worm for treatment.

TSO — Trichuris Suis Ova (pig whipworm eggs).  Biomonde (Asia) will mail TSO at 220 Euro a single dose.
You need a dose every 2 weeks so a course of 10 doses (20 weeks) will cost > AU$3,000. Very expensive!

TTO – Human whipworm is used by AIT. TTO lasts much longer than TSO, about 18 months, as opposed to 2 weeks for TSO.

General Info

Neither hookworm nor whipworm proliferate within the host, nor are they infectious in any real sense of the world in a country where either shoes or toilets are routinely used.

Hookworm live on average for five years, therefore the dosing interval is on average five years. For whipworm, which is indicated for ulcerative colitis, it is two years.

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FAR 5: Automate the adding of NavScript.js

May 19th, 2010

To refresh the memory. NavScript.JS can be used to add a link to the top of web pages. The link  reopens the navigation pane in uncompressed help. It wont show in a CHM or when the nav pane is open.

I’ve just extended an old post on using NavScript.JS with FAR Uncompressed Help topics.
You can easily insert the script into HTML files using the $R$[..] command in FAR Adv Find and Replace.
I’ve just added some instructions on how to automate this using FAR Batch mode.

If you haven’t used NavScript.JS then best to show an example. Open the FAR web help and immediately close the nav pane. You will see a link appear at the top of the topic page to reopen the nav pane.

Rob

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MS Touch Pack for Windows 7 Now Available

April 22nd, 2010

For a while now we early adopters of multi-touch have been watching as newer Touch Screens were released with this thing call MS Touch Pack containing cool touch applications… And wondering how to get our excited little hands on it. Wonder no more. If you have Win 7 Multi Touch the Touch Pack is now available for download.

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VS 2010 Help Power Toy

April 20th, 2010
Lots of things happening at the moment.
VS 2010 was released on 12th April, along with the new VS 2010 Help Viewer.
For those using VS 2010, Ryan Linton (MS Help Team) has just released a cool VS Extension that provides Help, Index and Search right inside the VS IDE.
http://mshcmigrate.helpmvp.com/news/helpviewerkeywordindexvs2010ext

Lots of things happening at the moment.

VS 2010 was released on 12th April, along with the new VS 2010 Help Viewer.
And Office 2010 RTM should be available on MSDN and Technet in just a few days.

For those using VS 2010, Ryan Linton (MS Help Team) has just released a cool VS Extension that provides Help, Index and Search right inside the VS IDE.

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Helpware news

March 10th, 2010

Updates to mshcMigrate & H3Viewer. And FAR HTML 5 finally released.

http://mshcmigrate.helpmvp.com/news/mshcmigrateb41h3viewerb22farhtml5

Rob

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Help 3 Report From Seattle Visit

February 27th, 2010

Back from the MVP Summit in Seattle where we spent 3 days with the Microsoft help team in charge of MS Help Viewer 1.0. Here’s a report of some things I picked up on Help 3.

http://mshcmigrate.helpmvp.com/news/helpnews

Also updated API documentation with latest info from Microsoft

http://helpware.net/mshelp3/intro.htm#Links

Rob

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Updates Available

February 9th, 2010

The following updates are available…

  • FAR HTML 5.0.0.728
    Build 728 fixes a problem reading/writing Unicode files where sometimes a trailing junk character was added to the file.
  • mshcMigrate build 36
    Fixes same problem as above.

We strongly recommend that all FAR 5 users and mshcMigrate users update ASAP.

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VS 2010 RC now available

February 9th, 2010

VS 2010 RC release is now available via MSDN subscriber downloads, and publicly available around the 10th of Feb.

So for those stuck on Beta 2 Help this is your chance to get something stable and release quality.

Please, anything you find in the RC that does not go well with mshcMigrate or H3Viewer please contact me (here or directly via robertc at helpware dot net)

Cheers
Rob

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Good Press for MS Help Viewer – Part 2

February 4th, 2010

Hi all,
Posted again into Brian Harry’s blogмебель в болгарии and CC’d here.

-

David, if you are using Beta 2 (although I suspect you are a partner on LCTP3), then I can well understand your frustration. Maybe my needs are different. I just want the correct help to open in a timely manner when I press F1 in the VS IDE. A 10 secs wait is unacceptable. It wont be 10 seconds in the next release. My response…

DExplore… c++ code, a decade old (they probably use VS 6 or a VS 7.0 Beta when they started the project). From what I understand it has had numerous band-aids and rework applied to it over it’s life time, yet the majority of developers are still frustrated by it and find Google better. And with good reason: Inaccurate F1 results; Long merge delays that lock up VS UI; Difficult to integrate into; A crazy search page; A proprietary file format and no 3rd party redistribution locks out developers; I’m very happy to see the back end of it!

DExplore F1 & search are so poor that most of us now rely on Index and TOC as the primary means of accessing help. MS stats confirm — Typical access usage is now: Index 48%, TOC 25%, F1 17%, Search 10%. :-(

So it’s easy to understand why users are frustrated and angry over losing both the Index and TOC. Well there is loband TOC which is great for users at the end of the line in China but I personally don’t find it helpful in the context of offline help. You can see my motivation for writing H3Viewer. So the help team recognised that more band-aids on DExplore was not the solution. It was time to bite the bullet and rewrite even if that meant taking a step backwards before moving forward again. With DExplore there was no more moving forward (in fact things were moving backwards).

It may take a while to mature but this new system has a future I think where DExplore was going no where. MS Help Viewer has a good foundation (please wait for the RC or RTM before judging it) and has the potential to become the next general help platform (replacing HTML help). As a general platform the UI will probably be very different. We so desperately need something that will handle large document sets, allows us to write in Unicode, and give developers a rich API (required in an age where UI and UA are blending more and more).

Is this helpful? We live our days in programs like VS and invest a lot of time in them. Change hurts. We are all watching hoping for a good outcome. Brian this is your territory — Have I got the history right? Thanks for allowing me to response.

Re: H3Viewer. I welcome any feedback people care to give please email me. I need feedback. Just remember that the slow access speed (long delays) are due to the current Beta 2 (really Alpha) help engine. The RC release is fast.

Rob
MS Help MVP
www.helpware.net

Posted in MS Help 3.x | Comments Off

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