Who cares about offline help, anyway?

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 here in the coming weeks.

Thanks,

Dawn Wood [MSFT]

Silverlight Documentation Manager

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  PingBack from http://www.simplynetdev.com/who-cares-about-offline-help-anyway/

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  When learning a new technology having help and intellisense on hand is a must. I don't know how many times I've gone to online help and MSDN can't deliver the page for one reason or another. By opting for web only help (and/or intellisence if that can be done) would increase the frustration level several notches at least and would be a great way to insure that Silverlight or any developer product would lose interest.

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  Intellisense => 10 Are you kidding me. It's like a blind man without his cane ;-) Offline => 5 Offline is fast, but it gets old quickly, when SL is continuously growing. Online => 8 I really want to use the online to ensure that I'm getting the latest updates, but somehow, MSDN help is VERY slow while accessing Online. But that would be my choice. Hope this helps! ..Ben

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  I think that: Intellisense - 10 It's a must. Offline docs - 9 You seriously never developed without having an active internet connection? I don't think developing for the web change too much in that sense. What's when you're working on train or something? When your ISP crashes you gotta stop developing too? Actually I think the documentation is most important when you're working offline. When you're online you can find a bunch of good articles on almost any topic you'd have a long time to figure out from docs anyways. F1 - 5 Well, I never used F1 on purpose neither... so far:). Now I see it's somewhat quicker than opening up msdn and typing in the required name. It'd be good to have it with SL, but without doubt the least important thing out of the three.

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  I say both. You can not decide for us. Ones will prefers online while others offline. Keep the same way that you are doing today with Visual Studio. See you.

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  Yes, offline access is still needed - sorry.  On site, on the road - there are many places where there's no connection. I was hoping that we would get a much better help system.  Something more like the Times Reader - where help is always local and automatically synchronized with MSDN online. And much much much faster.  I remember when F1 used to get you help in under a second.  

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  Wow, I'm surprised this is even being considered. Offline help is great whether you're online or not. It's faster, easier to search, and the F1 trigger is extremely useful. I'm surprised by those above that haven't discovered the utility of F1. Even if offline help did go away, Intellisense is an absolute must. People have a hard time getting up to speed on the APIs as it is, and taking away the easiest method of discovering the details would be a terrible mistake. So, tens on all of it for me.

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  Intellisense - 10 - I hope you were joking about removing this. F1 - 8 - not as essential as Intellisense but I use it fairly regularly Offline help - 10 - I develop offline sometimes on my laptop so lack of integration into offline MSDN would be a real problem.

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  @endquote: "I'm surprised by those above that haven't discovered the utility of F1." Well I just tried it again (last time on purpose was years ago). 20 seconds, then VS displays its most useless dialog "Delay Notifcation" -- the one with the Switch To..., Continue Waiting, and Cancel Operation (greyed out) that does absolutely nothing. It's now been 4 minutes and the "Help Update In Progress" is still running. (Core2 2.4GHz, 7200RPM disk, 2GB RAM). Just for fun, I opened MSDN directly. Load time? About 3 seconds. So, perhaps that's why I'm suspicious of the utility of the F1 key. For the last several years, I cannot remember any time it opened help that was useful (mostly it goes to an error page) or timely (I'll end up killing the VS process, since it's now been over 5 minutes). This isn't specific to this machine; I've had it happen on several other (much beefier) machines. It's not like it's hard to find stuff in MSDN; the index is fast and spot-on, and I usually keep MSDN open ayways. (MSDN Search is another story...)

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  Intellisense - 10 Offline docs - 10  - and should be updated when online. F1 - 6

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  8 for some kind of offline access to the docs. Folks just don't always have fast, reliable internet access. And MSDN can be too broad at times; it's nice to be able to automatically restrict the scope of the search to just the Silverlight content.

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  Intellisense is a must. It's the reason I love Visual Studio so much. Without Intellisense I might as well use notepad. Offline docs, not so bothered about it. But I would like to keep F1 support, if there are no offline docs, just find the item in the online docs @ msdn.microsoft.com. Offline docs are useful when they work though because they are a lot faster than waiting for a page to load.

• Anonymous
  October 09, 2008
  Intellisense is one of the great productivity aids in VS.  You should not, under any circumstances, consider reducing its coverage. Offline help is also a must for two three main reasons: (a) I often work without an Internet connection; (b) Internet connections fail periodically and (c) speed of access to the Internet (or even of the Internet itself in parts) can frequently be, putting it mildly, sub-optimal. Oh, and I use F1 quite a lot.

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2008
  I like the offline help a lot, that is a 10 for me. Intellisense - I agree with some of the previous posters, this should not even be a question!  I am all for it. Thanks for the poll.

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2008
  10 - Complete Offline support. The most secure network is the 'one not plugged in' (of course that might make it a uni-net). When I'm building/testing sensitive code, my ethernet cable is unplugged. :-) Yeah.....there's at least one like me out here. Thanks for taking our feedback.

• Anonymous
  October 10, 2008
  I agree entirely with the comments on Intellisense.  It's the single most critical VS feature for me and saves me huge amounts of time (often meaning I don't even need the docs).  I'm just going to assume the comment about removing it was a joke :)

• Anonymous
  October 11, 2008
  Yep, it is a must!  There are times you just do not have a connection and need the help offline.  Intellisense is a must, I value my time too much to be without it.

• Anonymous
  October 11, 2008
  Post: Approved at: Oct-11-2008 Silverlight 2.0 to be Released to the Wild Monday? It appears that Silverlight

• Anonymous
  October 12, 2008
  I cannot believe this is even a question being asked..

• Anonymous
  October 13, 2008
  VS has F1 support? :D Intellisense is essential and crucial to daily life. In many instances, it IS my help. I'll scroll through the pop-up and find what I'm looking for. My issue with offline support is it can get outdated - especially with SL. Additionally, online (as searching) will also yield various ways to do something with supporting rationale. While I haven't used offline support in a while, it's only been because I have been connected. I've used SQL's BOL a lot and it proved very handy.

• Anonymous
  January 10, 2009
  Intellisense  - 10 Please don't even think about taking this away Offline docs - 1 I don't really use it F1 Support   - 10 The first thing I use when I have a simple issue

• Anonymous
  July 29, 2009
  I agree with everyone else that Intellisense is the most vital help that the IDE gives us when developing. I'm not so worried about offline docs, but I have started using F1 again recently. It's not very good and often doesn't work, but when it does it's quicker than searching. When F1 doesn't work I usually close the offline docs and go to Google, often then ending up at the MSDN library online. I have to say I'm confused by the people complaining about the slow loading content navigation tree - I have it collapsed by default and then it doesn't seem to slow things down.

• Anonymous
  December 16, 2010
  F1 - 10 Intellisence - 10 Offline docs - 9