How to: Deploy and Integrate a Help Collection
After you have created your Help content, you undoubtedly want to make your collection available to your customers. This section discusses options for integrating your content with Visual Studio and deploying your collection.
Integrating and Registering Your Help Collection
There are two ways to integrate and register your Help content with Visual Studio:
Use the Help merge modules provided by Microsoft.
Use InnovaHxReg, a command-line registration tool offered with HelpStudio Lite.
The following procedures provide overviews of the different methods and links to topics with detailed instructions.
To use the Help merge modules to register and integrate your content
The easiest way to use the Help merge modules to integrate your Help collection with Visual Studio is by using the Help Integration wizard.
The Help Integration Wizard edits the Help merge modules and creates a Visual Studio set-up project for you. You compile the setup project to create an msi-file that is used to deploy your collection. For more information, see Help Integration Wizard Overview and How to: Use the Help Integration Wizard to Add a Help Collection to Visual Studio.
Alternately, you can create a Visual Studio setup project and manually edit the Help merger modules by using the Orca tool.
For more information, see Walkthrough: Registering and Integrating a Help Collection By Using Windows Installer.
To use InnovaHxReg to register and integrate your content
Use HelpStudio Lite to generate Help 2 files.
Use InnovaHxReg to deploy and register your collection.
For more information see the HelpStudio Lite documentation.
Improving the Discoverability of Your Help Collection
The Visual Studio SDK offers two new features to make your Help content more discoverable, the TOC Plug-in feature and "How Do I" pages.
To expose your Help collection
Set the location of your Help collection in the table of contents by using the TOC Plug-in feature.
For more information, see Inserting the Table of Contents of a Child Collection into a Parent Collection.
Provide a custom "How Do I" page.
A "How Do I" page is used to expose the most important nodes of your Help collection. To display a list of existing "How Do I" pages click How Do I on the Help menu in the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Alternatively, click the How Do I button on the toolbar in the Microsoft Document Explorer window.
For more information, see Custom "How Do I" Pages.