Deep Dive document download for the Help Integration sample included in the VS SDK.
Introduction
It is often required that we provide help information for our VSPackages. We do not need to create our own help system, we can use the one implemented in Visual Studio.
This sample demonstrates how to implement help functionality with tool windows and dialog boxes. The sample uses a tool window that pushes user context information based on its current state to enable the help functionality accessible with the F1 key. The sample implements a modal dialog box and illustrates how to use context-sensitive help from that dialog.
After reading this deep dive you are going to be familiar with the following concepts:
How to create a tool window with a user context?
How to display help from a tool window?
How to display help from a modal dialog?
To understand concepts treated here it is assumed that you are familiar with the idea of VSPackages and you know how to build and register very simple (even non-functional) packages. To get more information about packages, please have a look at the Package Reference Sample (C# Reference.Package sample).