Who cares about offline help, anyway?

10-08-2008 10:52 PM |

Silverlight is a web technology, right? So is it reasonable to assume that all of you have access to the web when you are developing your Silverlight applications?

One question we’re trying to answer here at Microsoft is whether anyone will even notice if we stop supporting F1 and Intellisense when you are using Visual Studio to develop Silverlight applications, or stop integrating the Silverlight help collection into the Visual Studio help system.

We’d like to stop guessing and put the question to you; our customers. If you have access to the Silverlight documentation on MSDN, do you really need (on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is you don’t need at all, 10 is absolutely essential):

Silverlight topics integrated into the Visual Studio help collection?
F1 support for Silverlight?
Intellisense support for Silverlight?

Add your comments here and we’ll compile and report the results to our blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/silverlight_sdk/) in the coming weeks.

Thanks,

Dawn Wood [MSFT]

Silverlight Documentation Manager

Re: Who cares about offline help, anyway?

10-09-2008 1:59 AM |

Hi, Dawn Wood, I have used silverlight for about three months, in this period, I find when I want to find the use of some class, the result from MSDN library is always wpf version. As you know, silverlight is just like wpf, but not is wpf, some classes are different from .net framework 3.5, so that I think the MSDN documentation should include those detail.

And for you question, if the documentation is just the same as online MSDN now, I think it is not necessary. I give 1 point for this. And I have downloaded your released documentation, maybe it is helpful somewhere.

Thanks!

Re: Who cares about offline help, anyway?

10-09-2008 3:08 AM |

Hi Dawn,

Silverlight topics integrated into the Visual Studio help collection? 10
F1 support for Silverlight? 1
Intellisense support for Silverlight? 1

I do have a question here. I think that if Silverlight topics are integrated into VS Help Collection then they can be automatically invoked through F1. Correct me if I am wrong here.

Offline help should always be there. We need to remember that in today's world, not all machines are exposed to web because of million of reasons. Over a period of time, I have seen that developers are not interested in exposing their machines (dev.) to internet. We should take this into consideration if we are thinking of dropping offline help from future release.

All the best! and thanks for creating such a nice technology for all of us.

Re: Who cares about offline help, anyway?

10-09-2008 6:39 PM |

Yes, it's relatively trivial to hook up F1 is the help collection is installed, and in fact we can also hook F1 up to online.

Thanks for your feedback and for the question,

Dawn

Re: Who cares about offline help, anyway?

10-09-2008 7:19 PM |

I, as a developer, should not have to be on the Internet to develop Silverlight apps. I should still be able to develop silverlight without being connected to the Internet. I can use the VS local server to develop and debug without the Internet. Likewise I should be able to access Silverlight Help and Documentation without an active Internet connection.

The F1 offline Help can be very helpful because it can be context sensitive. It should know from the project type that Silverlight help topics should be most relavant and should be listed first.

The goal of the Help should be to assist the developer to find the most relavant answers with the least amount of time and effort. MSFT has never done a good job of this IMHO. It would be a real shame if with Silverlight that MSFT made it even more tedious and time consuming to find critical technical information.

Re: Re: Who cares about offline help, anyway?

10-11-2008 11:55 AM |

Intellisense shouldnt be removed.

Actually, not many of the developer will memorize all the function names and calls. Let say for a Alert in Browsers, what we know is: it should be in somewhere in System.Windows.Browser

But we dont know exactly where it is for the Alert()... so the Intellisense does help us

Without it, we, at least I will be in trouble.