Microsoft Help Viewer
Microsoft Help Viewer 1.x is the offline help system (local help) developed by Microsoft that ships with Visual Studio 2010 and its associated MSDN Library.
Microsoft Help Viewer 1.x supersedes Microsoft Help 2 which is the help system used by Microsoft Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005/2008 and Office 2007.
This is a new product and does not use any of the old help 2 code base. During development it was referred to as MS Help 3.x. With the growing need for a general Unicode based help system, it has the potential of becoming the next general help system for Windows.
History
- Jan 2008 - April Reagan [MS PM] blogs that Microsoft will replace Microsoft Help 2.
- Apr 2009 - At WritersUA 2009 conference Microsoft announced Microsoft Help 3 will ship with Visual Studio 2010.
- Nov 2009 - Preview of new offline help ships with the VS 2010 Beta 2.
File Format
Help files has a ".mshc" (Microsoft Help Container) file 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.x 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.