Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 7, Help and Research

#59 Get Help

HACK

you select the Solution Explorer window and press F1, Visual Studio will

display a help document about how to use the Solution Explorer.

While you are developing, you can select a piece of code and press F1. This

will call up the documentation for whatever you happened to highlight.

When you do this, Visual Studio is performing an index search for the item

that you highlighted. If you have no code highlighted, it will provide help for

the best match based on context. For example, if your cursor is on the

.Clone

method of a String variable, F1 will take you to the help page for the String.

Clone

method. If there is more than one result for the item you highlighted,

you will see the index search dialog shown in Figure 7-1.

In this example, I highlighted

AssemblyConfiguration in my code and pressed

F1. If I highlighted the term

int and pressed F1, it would take me right to the

documentation about integers instead of showing me the index screen. You

can also access the Index search screen directly by going to Help

➝ Index.

Dynamic Help

Dynamic Help can be both a curse and a blessing. Elsewhere in the book, we

have recommended that you disable this feature to improve the perfor-

mance of the IDE

[Hack #44]. Dynamic Help can be a very useful tool; you just

need to weigh the performance versus the helpfulness of this tool for you. If

you find Dynamic Help to