making a help file for my application

Question

I'm working on a legacy application, i'm actually rewriting it from scratch in C#.NET. and it used to give some kind of help to the user using WinHelp but Vista(the system i'm developping on) says it doesn't support WinHelp. so what i'm asking is :

How do I make a similar system from C#.NET ? I want the new feature to be used in Vista, XP and previous Windows versions.

Answer 1

You really want to be looking into using the Microsoft Sandcastle documentation generator nowadays. It is perfectly capable of generating HTML Help v1.0/1.1 files (CHM) or v2.0 (for integration into Visual Studio Help). The actual .NET Framework development team used it (or a variant of it) to create the API documentation for the BCL, so you should have an idea of what it is capable of. I'm not sure on the exact nature of your intended documentation of course, but Sandcastle can be used both for generating API documentation and accompanying help pages (guides, tutorials, examples, whitepapers, glossaries, etc.) using its custom MAML (XML-like) markup language, which is essentially what gets used in XML comments in code.

Here is a basic guide to getting started with Sandcastle, but I suspect you'll just need to play around with it for a bit to understand it. The learning curve isn't particularly steep either, unless you insist on learning it from the command line. The easiest option by far is to use the Sandcastle Help File Builder GUI, which is superb tool and does not restrict you at all.

Another useful resource is this C# XML Documentation guide, which shows you how to properly document your API with XML comments that can get converted into CHM documentation and also IntelliSense.

Answer 2

You may try out Help & Manual. It's a great tool.

Answer 3

Use CHM files instead of pretty much deprecated WinHelp files. You can use HTML Help Workshop to create those files.