It wouldn't be a Visual Studio release without an entire overhaul of the Help system.
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yes, sometimes the help system works better than StackOverflow.com and Google. :) But I admit those occurances are few and far between. Can you imagine being the guy at Microsoft who is responsible for the help system in the next Visual Studio? Talk about a "red shirt" -- certainly not something you'd put on your resume. The last time they had a great help system was when the entire Win32 was shipped in a single .hlp file with their mstools tool chain.
Kenneth Kasajian wrote:
But I admit those occurances are few and far between.
True :) I remember trying it out a a couple of times when I first started out with Visual Studio... and never bothered with it since. Might try it out now and again depending on where this thread goes :-D
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yes, sometimes the help system works better than StackOverflow.com and Google. :) But I admit those occurances are few and far between. Can you imagine being the guy at Microsoft who is responsible for the help system in the next Visual Studio? Talk about a "red shirt" -- certainly not something you'd put on your resume. The last time they had a great help system was when the entire Win32 was shipped in a single .hlp file with their mstools tool chain.
Where's the smiley for "smiles whistfully while reminiscing about happier help systems" when you want it?
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
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What is you favorite and least favorite feature of the Help system in Visual Studio 2010? My favorite: 1. The version on the web looks the same as the locally installed version. Least favorite (in order of annoyance) 1. I can't click on the help page text (to give the page focus), and then use PgUp and PgDn to scroll through the text. I have to use the moust to scroll. Lame. 2. I was looking up TFS specific APIs, and it wasn't able to find it locally, even though I installed everything that was installable locally. I think when they release an API with Visual Studio, they should include it in the local version of the help. 3. Dynamic help was actually very useful. Sad to see it go
I would be grateful for a version that actually installs, and stays installed on my machine. ;P
"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"
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What is you favorite and least favorite feature of the Help system in Visual Studio 2010? My favorite: 1. The version on the web looks the same as the locally installed version. Least favorite (in order of annoyance) 1. I can't click on the help page text (to give the page focus), and then use PgUp and PgDn to scroll through the text. I have to use the moust to scroll. Lame. 2. I was looking up TFS specific APIs, and it wasn't able to find it locally, even though I installed everything that was installable locally. I think when they release an API with Visual Studio, they should include it in the local version of the help. 3. Dynamic help was actually very useful. Sad to see it go
The new format for the online help annoys me to no end! I'm still targeting .NET 2.0 with VS2005, and when I look up an API reference, it defaults to the .NET 4 version. I usually keep trying to use that for a few minutes before I remember there's stuff there i can't use.:mad: There used to be a nice helpful link to the right that let you jump straight to the reference for any version of .NET, but now I have to go to my address bar and make sure to include "VS80" somewhere in there to get the .NET 2 stuff. :mad: But hey, at least I can still get to it, right? Dybs
The shout of progress is not "Eureka!" it's "Strange... that's not what i expected". - peterchen
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Where's the smiley for "smiles whistfully while reminiscing about happier help systems" when you want it?
"WPF has many lovers. It's a veritable porn star!" - Josh Smith
As Braveheart once said, "You can take our freedom but you'll never take our Hobnobs!" - Martin Hughes.
LOL. I couldn't find an emoticon for stupefied :)
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The new format for the online help annoys me to no end! I'm still targeting .NET 2.0 with VS2005, and when I look up an API reference, it defaults to the .NET 4 version. I usually keep trying to use that for a few minutes before I remember there's stuff there i can't use.:mad: There used to be a nice helpful link to the right that let you jump straight to the reference for any version of .NET, but now I have to go to my address bar and make sure to include "VS80" somewhere in there to get the .NET 2 stuff. :mad: But hey, at least I can still get to it, right? Dybs
The shout of progress is not "Eureka!" it's "Strange... that's not what i expected". - peterchen
Yes, that's one of the worst "features" It's just as bad for other products, such when trying to use Office 2003, and all the help comes up for 2007. My favorite experience related to help recently was when I was using Word 2010. I simply couldn't remember how to change the page to two column mode. So I clicked on Help, and typed "multiple columns". Well, it did a Bing search and gave me an article on using Excel. :doh: It's like, guys -- just don't waste any more money on help docs, and use that money to make Visual Studio starts faster :)
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What is you favorite and least favorite feature of the Help system in Visual Studio 2010? My favorite: 1. The version on the web looks the same as the locally installed version. Least favorite (in order of annoyance) 1. I can't click on the help page text (to give the page focus), and then use PgUp and PgDn to scroll through the text. I have to use the moust to scroll. Lame. 2. I was looking up TFS specific APIs, and it wasn't able to find it locally, even though I installed everything that was installable locally. I think when they release an API with Visual Studio, they should include it in the local version of the help. 3. Dynamic help was actually very useful. Sad to see it go
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Yes, that's one of the worst "features" It's just as bad for other products, such when trying to use Office 2003, and all the help comes up for 2007. My favorite experience related to help recently was when I was using Word 2010. I simply couldn't remember how to change the page to two column mode. So I clicked on Help, and typed "multiple columns". Well, it did a Bing search and gave me an article on using Excel. :doh: It's like, guys -- just don't waste any more money on help docs, and use that money to make Visual Studio starts faster :)
< just don't waste any more money on help docs, and use that money to make Visual Studio starts faster > Or how about getting it to actualy work. Currently VS2010 is so unstable it comes under the heading unusable - even some of their own example programs crash VS2010. Role on the first Service pack! So at the moment help is irrelevant! Now ask me about VS 2008 help (no, better not......)
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What is you favorite and least favorite feature of the Help system in Visual Studio 2010? My favorite: 1. The version on the web looks the same as the locally installed version. Least favorite (in order of annoyance) 1. I can't click on the help page text (to give the page focus), and then use PgUp and PgDn to scroll through the text. I have to use the moust to scroll. Lame. 2. I was looking up TFS specific APIs, and it wasn't able to find it locally, even though I installed everything that was installable locally. I think when they release an API with Visual Studio, they should include it in the local version of the help. 3. Dynamic help was actually very useful. Sad to see it go
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Loading a large project in VS2010 takes much less time than in VS2008. This certainly impressed me a lot.
TOMZ_KV
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What is you favorite and least favorite feature of the Help system in Visual Studio 2010? My favorite: 1. The version on the web looks the same as the locally installed version. Least favorite (in order of annoyance) 1. I can't click on the help page text (to give the page focus), and then use PgUp and PgDn to scroll through the text. I have to use the moust to scroll. Lame. 2. I was looking up TFS specific APIs, and it wasn't able to find it locally, even though I installed everything that was installable locally. I think when they release an API with Visual Studio, they should include it in the local version of the help. 3. Dynamic help was actually very useful. Sad to see it go
IMHO, there is nothing good about this new help system. Fortunately I still have VS2008 installed along with its MSDN and it's still been adequate for me. I need to delve into one of those 3rd party Help3 viewers to see if they can make any difference with managing the VS2010 help documentation. What a huge step backward.
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Really? The "Visual Studio is preparing the solution" marquee dialog seems to make the loading process longer for me...
Both VS2008 and VS2010 were installed on my dev box. VS2010 takes about 1/2 of the time to load the same project. Due to this reason, I converted most of my projects to VS2010. The marquee dialog does occur. It could be machine dependent. My box is a Win7 32bit with 4G RAM. After starting, only 2G is available for running programs.
TOMZ_KV
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< just don't waste any more money on help docs, and use that money to make Visual Studio starts faster > Or how about getting it to actualy work. Currently VS2010 is so unstable it comes under the heading unusable - even some of their own example programs crash VS2010. Role on the first Service pack! So at the moment help is irrelevant! Now ask me about VS 2008 help (no, better not......)
I post this not to just be contrarian, but to encourage you - there are setups that work: I use VS2010 every day in a production environment, with hardly a trouble (perhaps once a month it crashes on me), and find it to be more stable than 2008 by far. So keep digging! I'm using the latest hardware, drivers, and Win7 Pro, if that makes any difference. (It does crash every time if I try to build a project for the .NET Compact Framework - in upgrading to 2010 and removing 2008, somehow I got that platform munged. Luckily I only do embedded programming for fun :))
Before .NET 4.0, object Universe = NULL;
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What is you favorite and least favorite feature of the Help system in Visual Studio 2010? My favorite: 1. The version on the web looks the same as the locally installed version. Least favorite (in order of annoyance) 1. I can't click on the help page text (to give the page focus), and then use PgUp and PgDn to scroll through the text. I have to use the moust to scroll. Lame. 2. I was looking up TFS specific APIs, and it wasn't able to find it locally, even though I installed everything that was installable locally. I think when they release an API with Visual Studio, they should include it in the local version of the help. 3. Dynamic help was actually very useful. Sad to see it go
I find the help system itself to be more stable, since (for me, anyway) it's running on MS servers - my context-help goes directly to FireFox and brings up a MSDN page. The gripe I really have about the help system is the same one I've had for years: the content. - Some methods throw exceptions that aren't in the help - Most of the help assumes that you already know everything about the class already. - Examples are incredibly simplistic, even for advanced classes (some of them just de-reference and print a few properties of the class, instead of showing me how the class is used in real life). Example is the WPF
Treeviewcontrol - the data is created and bound in the XAML - who would do this?!?!? There is no example showing data bound from aDataContext, or MVVM style - Not enough thought has gone into linking classes to other classes, the way a real programmer uses them. Example:Exceptionclass should have links all over it toAppDomain.UnhandledException. - non-working links. Example:Stringclass. Click on String Operators. What's sad about this one is that a couple of these can be automated to ensure code-coverage. All that being said, it is getting better than years past. But once you've used Borland's Delphi/C++ Builder help, using MS's help is just depressing.Before .NET 4.0, object Universe = NULL;
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Loading a large project in VS2010 takes much less time than in VS2008. This certainly impressed me a lot.
TOMZ_KV
That's good to hear. Is this a C# project or C++? What I would like to see is the IDE itself come up fast.
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That's good to hear. Is this a C# project or C++? What I would like to see is the IDE itself come up fast.
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< just don't waste any more money on help docs, and use that money to make Visual Studio starts faster > Or how about getting it to actualy work. Currently VS2010 is so unstable it comes under the heading unusable - even some of their own example programs crash VS2010. Role on the first Service pack! So at the moment help is irrelevant! Now ask me about VS 2008 help (no, better not......)
I would totally agree with you if that were my experience. But it hasn't been. I'm not sure why, but VS2010 hasn't crashed for me once.
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< just don't waste any more money on help docs, and use that money to make Visual Studio starts faster > Or how about getting it to actualy work. Currently VS2010 is so unstable it comes under the heading unusable - even some of their own example programs crash VS2010. Role on the first Service pack! So at the moment help is irrelevant! Now ask me about VS 2008 help (no, better not......)
Visual studio 2008 is quite good. Actually 2005 was better. With every new release, the IDE of the studio and the help becomes more fancy with the taste of the microsoft designers (and of course ten times slower than the previous one). Because simple user like fancy-looking programs, but programers like programs that actually work and Visual Studio is for programmers, they put a thousand new features, that nobody actually use, and after I am no longer happy, but bored looking at new features, I just write my code and press Build Solution (something that is not changed since VS98). The best feature of the VS 2010 - the new icon. The worst - I don't know, I am still trying to start VS 2010 under my configuration :)
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What is you favorite and least favorite feature of the Help system in Visual Studio 2010? My favorite: 1. The version on the web looks the same as the locally installed version. Least favorite (in order of annoyance) 1. I can't click on the help page text (to give the page focus), and then use PgUp and PgDn to scroll through the text. I have to use the moust to scroll. Lame. 2. I was looking up TFS specific APIs, and it wasn't able to find it locally, even though I installed everything that was installable locally. I think when they release an API with Visual Studio, they should include it in the local version of the help. 3. Dynamic help was actually very useful. Sad to see it go
Kenneth Kasajian wrote:
Least favorite (in order of annoyance) 3. Dynamic help was actually very useful. Sad to see it go
I found Dynamic Help to be a quick help for everything and miss it dearly. Another feature I miss is the registry hack to enable margin guidelines in the editor. VS2010 will only display the margins with the help of an extension which is fine on my development box. But many of the boxes I work on only have an Express version installed and can't utilize extensions - unless that's changed?