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I'm looking to create a indexable help file for a winforms app, but how do you get started?

The Microsoft MSDN is rubbish, it says "create a new project" but doesn't specify which type to create.

How do I go about creating a help file for my applications?

Uwe Keim
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flavour404
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2 Answers2

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Are you looking for this

Integrating "Help" into WinForms Application?

Uwe Keim
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rjovic
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Maybe this doesn't count as a real answer:

I would vote against those help files. 5-6 years back we had real context sensitive help files on a per-dialog-basis in our applications, and it was a lot of effort to maintain those.

Therefore, we changed this to shipping "simple" PDF files that appear on F1. We never got any complaints from users.

Recently we started migrating this to real HTML websites with lots of individual pages, a search function, "prev" and "next" navigation, and a printer-friendly format. This enables us to update the manual much quicker and makes it more "linkable" compared to PDF.

Personally, I really never get warm with those help files. E.g. I still do not understand why some files need to be trusted, before I can open and view them.

Uwe Keim
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