Microsoft Help Viewer
Microsoft Help 3.x is a new help system developed by Microsoft due to ship with Visual Studio 2010 and its associated MSDN Library.
Microsoft Help 3.x supersedes Microsoft Help 2 which was the help system used by Microsoft Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005/2008 and Office 2007.
History
- Jan 2008 - April Reagan [MS] blogs that Microsoft will replace Microsoft Help 2.
- Apr 2009 - At WritersUA 2009 conference Microsoft announced Microsoft Help 3.0 will ship with Visual Studio 2010.
File Format
A Microsoft Help 3.x file has a ".mshc" (Microsoft Help Container) extension and is simply a standard Zip file renamed. It contains no proprietary files, just the authors content files.
A compiler (Workshop) is not required. Instead help files are ripped (Indexed) at installation time.
Topics files are written in XHTML 1.1 compatible HTML. Standard HTML Meta Tags are used to define various topic attributes including the Table of Contents (TOC), Visible Index and F1 Keyword list.