Professional Visual Studio® 2008

5.7. Accessing Help

The easiest way to get help for Visual Studio 2008 is to use the same method you would use for almost every Windows application ever created — press the F1 key, the universal shortcut key for help. If you do so, the first thing you'll notice is that help is contextual. For instance, if the cursor is currently positioned on or inside a class definition in a Visual Basic project, the help window will open immediately with a mini-tutorial about what the Class statement is and how it works, as shown in Figure 5-13.

Figure 5.13. Figure 5-13

This is incredibly useful because more often than not, simply by choosing the right-click context menu and pressing F1, you can go directly to a help topic that deals with the problem you're currently researching.

However, in some situations you will want to go directly to the table of contents, or the search page within the help system. Visual Studio 2008 enables you to do this through its main Help menu (see Figure 5-14).

Figure 5.14. Figure 5-14

In addition to the several help links there are also shortcuts to MSDN forums and for reporting a bug.

5.7.1. Document Explorer

The help commands shown in Figure 5-14, with the exception of Dynamic Help, will open the main help documentation for Visual Studio 2008. Microsoft has ...