Microsoft .NET Features

Help Builder assists .Net developers in several ways:

Importing .Net Assemblies and Classes for instant documentation
Using the Import option from the main toolbar allows importing of individual .Net classes or even entire .Net assemblies into a Help Builder project. The import breaks out the classes (for assembly imports) and breaks down each member with full signature information into individual topics. If XML comments have been used and the XML file exist this documentation is utilized to provide extended information beyond the assembly meta data. The result is very professional looking documentation that can be further edited with Help Builder.

Visual Studio 2005-2010 Integration
Provides the ability to directly access Help Builder from the Visual Studio .NET IDE to push and pull Help Builder content directly to and from your applications. Specifically you can pull Help Ids from Help Builder directly into WinForms and WinForm controls, update C# and VB.NET XML Comments from Help Builder Topics or update Help Builder Topics from C# and VB.NET classes, methods, properties, fields and events.

HelpBuilderHelpProvider Class This is a customized subclass of the .NET WinForms HelpProvider class that provides enhanced functionality for hooking Help Events and more importantly to interact optionally with Help Builder at runtime. With the default behavior enabled you can press Alt-F1 at runtime to bring up Help Builder with in Context Sensitive mode to allow editing Help Content in real time. This feature makes it possible to allow Documentation to be created independently of the development process.

All Source Code for .NET integration features available
The Source Code for the HelpBuilderHelpProvider and Visual Studio .NET Add-In is provided for those that want to customize the functionality of the .NET integration features. The VS.NET add-in code serves as an example how to utilize the Help Builder COM object through .NET COM Interop using Late Binding.

The source code for both projects is available from: http://www.west-wind.com/files/HelpBuilderDotNetIntegration.zip


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