The Help Guy

Paul O'Rear's blog for all things Help technology related.

Installing Content From Downloaded Help Viewer 2.0 cabs

Today I have a guest post from my good friend and co-worker in the Help Viewer team, Malcolm...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 04/10/2012

Hook Up Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview and Visual Studio Express for Windows Developer Preview to Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview content on MSDN

I hope you’ve been having fun exploring the new features of both Visual Studio 11 Developer...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 09/21/2011

Help Viewer 2.0 + Visual Studio 11/Windows 8 Developer Preview

I've been rather quiet lately - but for good reason! (We've been really busy!) Hopefully, by now,...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 09/15/2011

VS 2010 SP1 Beta now available - including new client Help Viewer!

Please check out my boss Jeff Braaten's blog regarding our new client help viewer now shipping with...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 12/10/2010

Help Viewer 1.1 Preview Video

I’m excited to announce that we have just posted a preview video of Help Viewer 1.1, which...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 10/27/2010

Help State of the Union (October 2010)

Periodically, questions come to Microsoft via a variety of avenues regarding our current guidance on...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 10/26/2010

Fixed Help SDK download now available

Thanks for everyone who helped us identify the issue with our original download. We have rebuilt and...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 09/01/2010

Help Viewer 1.0 SDK now available!

It's been a long time coming, but we have finally released the Help Viewer 1.0 SDK. It can be...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 08/06/2010

Since starting this blog, I've had a few requests to post links to various software products and...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 08/05/2010

EC Software's Help & Manual now supporting Sandcastle

This just in from Tim Green @ EC Software, GmbH: Just saw your posts and the announcements about the...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 07/01/2010

Re-post: Helixoft VSDocman adds support for VS 2010 Help

(It appears during forum migration this post got deleted from my blog - so re-posting...) I'm glad...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 07/01/2010

Sandcastle with MSHC support has been released!

I'm pleased to announce that we have posted a release of Sandcastle that now supports the MSHC Help...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 06/24/2010

Have you heard about the Preview of MSDN Online Updates?

If you've worked for any time at all with the .NET Framework and have looked up documentation in the...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 06/22/2010

Updating multiple VS 2010 installations' Help content with a single download

A question that we've begun to see come up from folk that have generally low-bandwidth is whether...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 04/29/2010

Clever workaround for getting dynamically inserted javascript or stylesheets to work in Help Viewer 1.0

Working with our Visual Studio 2010 (and earlier!) partners, I'm frequently impressed with the...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 02/23/2010

Partner Content Discoverability Options in Visual Studio 2010, Part II: Shortcuts

One of the side benefits of the F1 feature I wrote about the other day is that vendors can...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 02/16/2010

Partner Content Discoverability Options in Visual Studio 2010, Part I: Context Sensitive Help (F1)

If you haven't seen the announcement about the Visual Studio 2010 RC release - check out this page....

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 02/09/2010

Some updates

I added a few more items to the Known Issues page. Also, a new page added: Calling Help Viewer 1.0...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 02/02/2010

Calling Help Viewer 1.0 from Visual Studio add-in code

The Visual Studio interface for launching Help using an F keyword (context sensitive help keyword)...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 02/02/2010

Help Authoring Tool (HAT) support for Help Viewer 1.0

As we've been ramping up the new the Help Viewer and its associated Help file format (MSHC), we've...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/26/2010

What are we trying to accomplish with code signing content?

Help file content and web content have historically been significant attack vectors that hackers and...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/22/2010

How to sign your .cab files

(see highlighted section below for the specifics of creating a Test certificate) · Generate a .cab...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/21/2010

Working with signed .cab files

There's been a fair amount of discussion both in private emails and on the MSHelp3 Yahoo! group...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/21/2010

Known Issues

There are a handful of "known issues" with Help Viewer 1.0 that we will be shipping with at VS 2010...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/20/2010

Known Issues with Help Viewer 1.0

· No ‘.’s allowed in .mshc/.cab file names; i.e. abc.mshc = good, abc.123.mshc = bad · No character...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/20/2010

Which IVsHelp Interfaces are supported in Visual Studio 2010?

Please see my page posted here. As I publish new pages, they will all be easily accessed via the...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/20/2010

Which IVsHelp Interface methods are supported in Visual Studio 2010?

Confirming with the VS Platform team, I have the following information. The following methods are...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/20/2010

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to “The Help Guy” blog! Why “The Help Guy?” I was aiming for just “Help Guy”, but...

Author: Paul ORear MSFT Date: 01/18/2010