Help Tools
This topic describes the tools that are available for creating Help and integrating it into Visual Studio.
Content Authoring Tools
HelpStudio Lite
HelpStudio Lite is a set of tools that you can use to author and build Help content, and create, manage, and compile Help projects. HelpStudio Lite produces compiled Help files (.hxs and .hxc) that can be integrated into the Visual Studio Help collection.
HelpStudio Lite is an Innovasys Ltd. product. You can download it on the Innovasys Web site.
Sandcastle
Sandcastle is a new and evolving set of tools to produce Help content. It produces MSDN-style API reference documentation by reflecting over source assemblies and using comments in the source code to generate documentation. It also includes transforms to produce conceptual documentation. Microsoft uses Sandcastle to build the .NET Framework documentation.
Sandcastle includes the following executable tools.
MRefBuilder
Reflects over managed assemblies to produce an XML-formatted reflection information file.BuildAssembler
Collates information from comment files and reflection information files into a set of HTML pages.XslTransform
Applies XSL transforms to XML files.
For more information and download instructions, see the Sandcastle blog.
Help Integration Tools
Help Integration Wizard
The Help Integration Wizard takes an .hxs file as input and then produces a Visual Studio deployment project. You can compile the deployment project to produce merge modules or an .msi file that will install, register, and merge your Help collection into Visual Studio. For more information, see Help Integration Wizard Overview.
InnovaHXReg
HelpStudio Lite includes the InnovaHXReg command-line tool to deploy and register Help collections. For more information, see the HelpStudio Lite documentation.
Other Tools
Document Explorer
Document Explorer (DExplorer.exe) is the documentation viewer for Visual Studio. In addition to displaying topics, it enables browsing and searching and provides many other features. For information about how to use Document Explorer, see Help on Help (Microsoft Document Explorer Help). For information about how to programmatically control Document Explorer in Visual Studio, see Programmatically Interacting with Document Explorer.
Namespace
The Namespace.exe utility lets you list registered Help namespaces. This tool is installed in the <Visual Studio SDK installation path>\HelpIntegration\ folder.
Command Line Tools
The Visual Studio SDK installs three command-line tools, HXComp.exe, HXMerge.exe, and HXReg.exe. These can be used to manually compile, merge, and register help content. For more information, see Help Command-Line Programs.