Windows Form Help Application

[kyledunn]

Hey guys,

I need to write a help application for a windows desktop program like the one that appears in many of Microsoft's windows products that includes a Contents tab, Index tab and a Search tab with a results window to the right side. Maybe you have an approach with ASP.NET that I can adapt to a windows form. Can anyone offer some direction to help me get started?

Kyle

 

[jfrost10]

Hey Kyle,

I havn't played much with vb.net for desktop apps, but here's a general idea to get you in the right direction:

1. Add a tab control to the form. Now in vb 6.0, you just had to add the control, and you then added controls to the panes for each tab. So all your listboxes, text boxes, etc. would go there.

2. Are your help pages web files? If so, you should be able to put a WebBrowser control (not sure if thats the name, but basically creates a web browser panel) on your form next to the tab control. When a user clicks on an item in your index, find, etc., the connecting help page is then displayed in the webbrowser control.

3. The code to change the selected index of the list box would probably be some sort of sub thats triggered (for the index) on the txtbox.OnChange command, which takes the string from the txtbox and finds the next match in the listbox. The search would be a straight: Select blah from table where BlahName Like 'blahtext%'. Contents should be a tree view control, possibly with an xml file for the tree and an XSLT file for the formatting.

Also, I know that for vb 6.0 you can get help file-like programs where you just have to add in your html pages for the actual contents, so looking into that might be an option too.

Hope this helped Kyle, talk later buddy.

Jack

 

[kyledunn]

Hey Jack,

One of the other forums directed me to the Microsoft HTML Help Workshop. It's exactly what I was looking for. It's free and has everything I need. Thanks for your input. Boy have I been buried in this WinForm project. I have an ASP.NET project coming up next so I hope to be around more. Thanks again.

Kyle