Viewing

There are three types of context-sensitive help in Visual Studio:

1.A help topic is shown when you point to some member in source code or Object Browser and press F1.

2.Quick summary is shown in IntelliSense and Object Browser.

3.Short property description is shown in Properties Window.

F1 Context help

This type is only supported by MS Help Viewer, Help 2 and HTML Help 1.x (CHM) formats. When you compile your help in one of these formats, context help is automatically set on your machine. You can test it when you restart VS IDE or Help Viewer after documentation compilation.

To see Visual Studio dynamic help integration including context-sensitive help, go to the code editor and select an expression with some method, property or other documented member. For example click on prop1 in expression If prop1 = "hello" Then. Now if you press F1, the proper topic should appear.

You can also press F1 on some member in Object Browser to invoke the help topic.

 

IntelliSense and Object Browser Quick Info

This type of context-sensitive help works with ANY output format, including Docx, HTML, XML and others.

In Context Help options, you can instruct VSdocman to generate special XML file called PROJECT_NAME.xml in your project folder (not output folder). You must place it manually in the folder where the resulting DLL file is located.

Note

Checking this option is only necessary if the same feature built in Visual Studio is not sufficient. For example, you want to exclude private members or generate the file for a web site. To do it directly in Visual Studio:

•For a Visual Basic project, on the Project menu, click Properties and then Compile tab. On the Compile page, select Generate XML documentation file.

•For a C# project, on the Project menu, click Properties and then Build tab. On the Build page, select XML documentation file.

If you create the project with reference to your DLL and you use methods or properties from that DLL, IntelliSense in Visual Studio automatically shows their description and description of parameters as you write them.

Description of a method or a property is taken from their <summary> tag in comments.

Description of parameters is taken from <param> tags.

You can see the summary information in Object Browser as well.

 

Property Description in Properties Window

When you select any property of a control or a component in Properties Window, you can see a short description.

This description is not extracted from your comments but from Description attribute of your property. So if you wish to display this info you need to define Description attribute:

Visual Basic

<System.ComponentModel.Description("Indicates whether the toggle button is in pushed state.")> _

Public Property Pushed() As Boolean

C#

[System.ComponentModel.Description("Indicates whether the toggle button is in pushed state.")]

public bool Pushed

VSdocman offers an easy way to do it through a context menu.

Deploying

To deploy F1 context help you must register your documentation on a target machine. RegisterHelpReg.exe utility does it automatically for Help2 and HTML Help 1.x (CHM). See how to deploy Help 2 and how to deploy CHM (HTML Help 1.x). For MS Help Viewer, see how to deploy MS Help Viewer.

Deploying IntelliSense help is very easy. Just distribute PROJECT_NAME.xml file with your DLL in the same directory.

To deploy property description in Properties Window you needn't do anything. Just add Description attribute to your property and it will be compiled as a metadata in your assembly.

See Also

View and Deploy CHM (HTML Help 1.x) Documentation | View and Deploy Help 2 Documentation | View and Deploy MS Help Viewer Documentation | View and Deploy Solution Documentation