Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 7, Help and Research

#59 Get Help

HACK

Notice how Dynamic Help picked up on the fact that you highlighted the

word

int and now displays multiple help documents pertaining to the int

type. Dynamic Help can be a great tool for a learning developer—targeted

help topics will always be at your fingertips whatever you happen to be

working on.

Contents and Search

If normal F1 and Dynamic Help are not providing the information you need,

it is time to turn to either the Contents window or the Search window. Both

of these portions of help require more work on your part to find what you

need. The Contents window is a simple table of contents for all the .NET

help installed on your machine and is shown in Figure 7-4.

Using the Contents window, you can browse through all the help collec-

tions installed on your machine. A help collection is a group of help docu-

ments pertaining to a particular topic. In Figure 7-4, each of the top-level

nodes is a separate help collection—you can tell from this that I have cer-

tain tools like ReSharper and Visual Studio .NET Help Integration Kit

installed.

If you would rather not browse through this tree structure, you can use the

Search window, which will perform a full-text search on help using key-

words that you provide. The Search window can be seen in Figure 7-5.

After clicking Search, you will see the results screen shown in Figure 7-6.

Figure 7-4. Help Contents ...