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Good Press for MS Help Viewer

David, Help Agent is the help engine, so we need to wait until that loads into memory before any help calls can be made. So it is Asynchronous operation once it actually loads and is running.

In the past, new help content would lockup VS for minutes as it installed/merged. This wont happen now. But I take your point that you had to wait for several seconds for F1 help to respond first time.
Agent is a .NET app and so we get that customary long delay as the .NET Framework is loaded into memory the first time. But after that Agent will respond quickly. Currently the Beta 2 release is very unstable (beta 2 for VS, but more like Alpha code for Help Viewer). Be assured that you will see a huge improvement in the RC and RTM releases.
I’m using a pre-RC build and I no longer get Agent crashes. If I manually kill off Agent using the tray icon, Agent reloads and services my request within just a second or two (since framework is now loaded in memory). And once Agent is running I can fire off several help API calls in fast succession (I’m building a full TOC on the fly) and get all responses within 200-300 msec.  Given this help collection of some half million topics that’s quite impressive. And my Win7 test machine is a very old PC.
Another comment is that if your default browser is IE or FireFox… These browser can load very slowly for me. I use Chrome and get a much better experience. Once the browser is loaded it’s faster of course.
Also there will be alternative viewers you can use (as Brain was saying). If you haven’t tried it yet.. please try my H3Viewer.exe — this is basically a DExplore style Help Viewer with full TOC and Index. I can set this as the default VS 2010 and MS HV viewer. I just did a test then
1. Open VS 2010 (default viewer = Chrome). Time for F1 to complete 1.3 seconds.
2. Open VS 2010 (default viewer = H3Viewer customer viewer). Time for F1 to complete .8 of a second.
But it all depends on whether software has been recently loaded. If Chrome was not run today it would takes 3 seconds to load the F1 topic. And if help Agent has not been loaded today then add several more seconds for .NET Framework to load.
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Can I just make a general comment (not directed at anyone here). It’s great how everyone has offered fantastic feedback. But please be gentle. The first release of help was basically Alpha. This team started to form only 24 months ago and I think what they have done a remarkable job so far.  The API is the best we have ever seen in a help system. The ability to find and display a topic, from a catalog of half a million topics in less than a second is remarkable.
As Brian was saying this wont be a fully featured release. Please don’t expect it to be totally mature for the 1.0 release. 24 months is just not enough time to ramp up a new team, try out various designs, and deliver something with all the bells and whistles. PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH THE TEAM. They are working around the clock to finish this project. From what I have seen so far it’s outstanding work. The RTM will be even better.
IMHO they have been very smart, in that they spent a lot of time designing a kick-arse engine and API (getting the base system right). A lot of people are complaining about losing features. But hey use another viewer. I did my H2Viewer in under a week and it’s almost as powerful as DExplorer. It will all get there in the end. BTW Great to see posters in Brian’s blog know how to post their opinions without be rude about it.  Nice!! I know the help team have all this great feedback. It’s probably more effective without the bad language and death threats :-)
Rob
MS Help MVP
helpware.net

Hi all,
Just posted this to Brian Harry’s blog and thought I’d post here as well.

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David, Help Agent is the help engine, so we need to wait until that loads into memory before any help calls can be made. So it is Asynchronous operation once it actually loads and is running.

In the past, new help content would lockup VS for minutes as it installed/merged. This wont happen now. But I take your point that you had to wait for several seconds for F1 help to respond first time.

Agent is a .NET app and so we get that customary long delay as the .NET Framework is loaded into memory the first time. But after that Agent will respond quickly. Currently the Beta 2 release is very unstable (beta 2 for VS, but more like Alpha code for Help Viewer). Be assured that you will see a huge improvement in the RC and RTM releases.

I’m using a pre-RC build and I no longer get Agent crashes. If I manually kill off Agent using the tray icon, Agent reloads and services my request within just a second or two (since framework is now loaded in memory). And once Agent is running I can fire off several help API calls in fast succession (I’m building a full TOC on the fly) and get all responses within 200-300 msec.  Given this help catalog has some half million topics that’s quite impressive. And my Win7 test machine is very old and slow.

Another comment is that if your default browser is IE or FireFox… These browser can load very slowly for me. I use Chrome and get a much better experience. Once the browser is loaded it’s faster of course.

Also there will be alternative viewers you can use (as Brain was saying). If you haven’t tried it yet.. please try my H3Viewer.exe — this is basically a DExplore style Help Viewer with full TOC and Index. I can set this as the default VS 2010 and MS HV viewer. I just did a test then

1. Open VS 2010 (default viewer = Chrome). Time for F1 to complete 1.3 seconds.

2. Open VS 2010 (default viewer = H3Viewer customer viewer). Time for F1 to complete .8 of a second.

But it all depends on whether software has been recently loaded. If Chrome was not run today it would takes 3 seconds to load the F1 topic. And if help Agent has not been loaded today then add several more seconds for .NET Framework to load.

–

Can I just make a general comment (not directed at anyone here). It’s great how everyone has offered fantastic feedback. But please be gentle. The first release of help was basically Alpha. This team started to form only 24 months ago and I think what they have done an outstanding job so far.  The API is the best we have ever seen in a help system. The ability to find and display a topic, from a catalog of half a million topics in less than a second is remarkable.

As Brian was saying this wont be a fully featured release. Please don’t expect it to be totally mature for the 1.0 release. 24 months is just not enough time to ramp up a new team, try out various designs, and deliver something with all the bells and whistles. PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH THE TEAM. They are working around the clock to finish this project. From what I have seen so far it’s outstanding work. The RTM will be even better.

IMHO they have been very smart, in that they spent a lot of time designing a kick-arse engine and API (getting the base system right). A lot of people are complaining about losing features. But hey use another viewer. I did my H3Viewer in under a week and it’s almost as powerful as DExplorer. It will all get there in the end. BTW Great to see posters in Brian’s blog know how to post their opinions without being rude about it.  Nice!! I know the help team have noted all this great feedback. It’s probably more effective without the bad language and death threats :-)

Rob
MS Help MVP
www.helpware.net

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 2:33 pm and is filed under MS Help 3.x. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Good Press for MS Help Viewer”

  1. CS says:
    April 15, 2010 at 11:21 am

    Yeah well, at least they could ship VS 2010 so that help would work with Firefox…..it doesn’t, at all…. I’m sorry, but, for all the hoopla, VS2010 isn’t that great…it just looks really pretty.

    Reply

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