Integrating “Help” into WinForms Application

Question

I am working on a Visual Studio we need to integrate help menus into it. I would like to do this in the canonical Windows fashion but am not very experienced with the .NET f

Answer 1

You are looking for something called the Help Provider. It's a form component. It allows you to respond to F1 calls on forms or form controls and map that to a section in a help file.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.helpprovider.aspx

http://www.dotnetspider.com/resources/24241-F-Help-Provider.aspx

http://netpl.blogspot.com/2007/07/context-help-made-easy-revisited.html

CHM files can be made with a number of free tools. Google "Free CHM Editors" or something similar. There isn't anything integrated with VS by default.

You don't get the data out of them. What happens is when you wire a control to the help provider, you provide a path to the section in the CHM that is relevant. It will then load a CHM viewer and show the relevant section.