Microsoft Help 2.x

This section contains information on Microsoft Help 2.x, the Help engine behind Visual Studio .net, MSDN, and TechNet.

• Help2RuntimeCompiler - How to get the runtime installed. Microsoft announcements. VSHIK (Workshop) is required to create your own MS Help 2 content.
• Help2Articles - H2 tutorials and whitepapers, H2 programming.
• Help2FAQ - H2 frequently asked questions.
• Help2Buglist - List of known H2 bugs.
• Help2Tips - Tips and Tricks for H2
• Help2Resources - H2 Web sites, authoring tools, registration tools, and viewers.
• Help2API - MS Help 2 API Information

Getting Started

• MS H2 Collection Tutorial by MVP Rob Chandler
• FAR HTML - Shareware H2 authoring program. Contains wizards to make creating H2 content easy.
• Read the VSHIK 2003 (Help 2 SDK) online help. Note the VS Help Integration Kit (SDK) is now part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK (formally known as VSIP).

What's New

• Dec 2005 - Help Integration Wizard release version (VS 2005 compatible) is now available.
• July 2005 - VS 2005 Beta 2 release. The VS Help Integration Kit (SDK) is now part of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK (formally known as VSIP). MS now advise that we plug our 3rd party collections into MS.VSIPCC.
• (MS.VSCC.
• for VS 7.x).
• Aug 2003 - Borland have released C# Builder. Documentation is all in MS Help 2 and displayed in DExplore. They are legally able to do this because they are licensed to distribute .NET SDK (which installs MS Help 2 runtime). See Helpware: Integrating into Borland C# Builder
• Jan 2003 - The Microsoft Help team has decided not to release Microsoft Help 2 as a general Help platform... MS Help 2 will remain a VS Help integration tool.
• May 2003 - VSHIK 2003 was released for VS 7.1 (Everett). It's much the same as VSHIK 2.1 (2002), but the two White Papers (.DOCs) have been updated and integrated into the VSHIK Help and the MSI files are now compatible with the new VS 7.1 release (which uses Namespace!MS.VSCC.2003 instead of MS.VSCC).