What’s New in Help for Visual Studio
Many enhancements have been made to Help for this release. These enhancements include:
Help viewer default Help displays in an external Help viewer, Microsoft Document Explorer, by default rather than inside the IDE.
How Do I page This page contains a list of task topics, organized by category and subcategory, for a subset of the documentation for a product. Use this page to quickly locate information by subject area.
Community integration You can access forums and newsgroups, directly from within Help, to post questions, search for interesting threads, or check the status of your post.
Search Search results now display an abstract for each topic. In addition, icons appear at the bottom of the topic abstract that provide additional information such as the programming language a topic applies to, as well as the topic source.
Figure 1: The new Help Search page
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Filters You can now choose one filter for Contents and Index and a separate filter for Search. For more information, see Help Filters for Visual Studio.
For more information, see What's New in Document Exploration.
Online Help Sources
You can now choose to incorporate MSDN Online, Codezone Community, and Questions content into your Help experience. MSDN Online has the latest product documentation, including quarterly updates. Codezone Community content includes articles, samples, and other information located on select third-party Web sites, such as GotDotNet. Questions content posts from online forums.
The first time you attempt to access Help, a dialog box appears requesting that you specify your help source preferences. You can change your online Help preference at any time from the Online, Help, Environment, Options Dialog Box. You can choose to display F1 topics located on MSDN Online and perform searches on Help content located on your computer as well as the Web. For search, results are grouped by the source of the topic: Local Help, MSDN Online, Codezone Community, and Questions. Only one set of results can be viewed at a time. You can switch among the different sources' results by selecting a source on the right of your search results.