Dynamic Help Removed From Visual Studio 2010 : LeeDumond.com

Dynamic Help Removed From Visual Studio 2010

Been going blind looking for the Dynamic Help window in the new VS 2010 Beta 2? Me too… until I learned this bit of bad news from a inside source.

Like many of you, I’ve been messing around with the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. VS 2010 contains a number of long-awaited IDE improvements, like multiple monitor support, new editing and design tools, and a cleaner, more responsive WPF-based interface.

So far, I’m loving all of it. Well, almost all of it.

I happen to be a huge fan of Visual Studio’s Dynamic Help feature. This is a window containing links to related Help topics based on where you are in the IDE.

dynamic_help

In fact, I recently wrote a blog post explaining how to integrate exception handling into the development cycle. The process I presented in that post makes good use of this handy feature.

In previous versions of Visual Studio, I’ve always placed the Dynamic Help window to the right side in Auto-Hide mode, ready at a moment’s notice. However, when I went to set up VS 2010 in the same way, I noticed that the Dynamic Help window appeared to have been left off the Help menu.

"Okay, no big deal," I thought. It is beta software after all. You can't really complain if a beta appears a little half-baked, right?

Nevertheless, this was still disappointing to me. I was tempted to report this as a bug, but just didn’t feel like dealing with the massive vortex of suck that is Microsoft Connect. So instead, I did what most other malcontented developers do – I complained on Twitter.

A few hours later - much to my chagrin - I received the following reply:

Whaaaaaa? This made absolutely no sense to me. I figured it couldn’t be true… until I learned that Charles Christian is actually a Project Manager on the Visual Studio Help Experience Team. So, there you go. I guess if anyone would be in a position to know, he’d be the guy.

Sure enough, a quick visit to the MSDN seemed to confirm it. Check it out below – no link to 4.0 up there near the top.

It looks like Visual Studio 2010 will definitely take some getting used to – because of all the new features added, and for at least one that was taken away.

I’ve asked Charles to provide an explanation as to why Dynamic Help was removed. As soon as I get a reply, I’ll update this post. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Charles' explanation appears below in the comments.

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November 01 2009 Lee Dumond 14 Comments

Filed under: Blog

Tagged as: visual-studio, opinion

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Hello Lee,

I traced to the root of this and got the below response.

When Dynamic Help was first launched, a lot of users disabled it because of the loss of real estate in the screen, the distracting flickering and that the results were too general to be helpful. Because of this, in subsequent releases, almost all of the VS profiles disabled Dynamic Help by default. The customer feedback data showed a very low percentage of users opting back in to this feature. Our UE teams were also not resourced to do the attribution that is required to make the results more useful. With all of this, the Visual Studio team decided to no longer invest in this feature and decoupling Help System from Visual Studio 2010 made it easier to cut this feature.

While the above is true, the underlying architecture is still available and you can easily add an extension if you are interested. Please let me know if you are interested and I will be happy to help.

Regards,

Charles

Charles Christian — November 5, 2009 12:12 AM
noooo, i love dynamic help!!!!

we should create a petition....

giammin — November 12, 2009 3:36 AM
That was a pretty bad decision.

Dynamic Help was the quick way to get to the REAL help entry one needed. Now I highlight OffsetRect, looking for the specifics of the Windows function call, and instead am taken directly to... The CRect class.

Why does Microsoft think that new versions should not have all the user features previous versions have? Poll the user community, ask them whether they could live without a feature, then in some future version take it out if they really are ambivalent.

-Noel

Noel C — November 22, 2009 4:53 PM
I also think this is unfortunate. I hope someone comes out with an extension for it. This is one of the first tips I give to any new developer or people I notice not using it. It was invaluable my first few years as a .NET developer and is extremely helpful when dealing with a new namespace or new release of .NET. Just noticed it was missing when I wanted to go to the help documentation for Directory.EnumerateFiles

Jeff Klawiter — December 25, 2009 3:32 PM
Well this was the 1st time I visited your Blog, and this entry immdeatly caught my eye. I have used dynamic help for years and encourage everyone on my team to use it. I guess I am in that small % of people that used it. I will keep an eye on this post, and hope that an extension appears. Thank you for the information.

Allen C. — January 14, 2010 2:50 PM
Disappointing. I found this blog as I began looking for a way to turn on Dynamic Help in VS 2010 and couldn't find it on the menus.

I tended not to leave Dynamic Help visible all the time, but it was a tab on a pane within easy reach.

My typical usage pattern was to type something like, say, "std::multimap" in my code, then click on the Dynamic Help tab and start browsing the help for the class members of multimap.

Which is exactly what I was just trying to do, and why I'm here now.

:(

spatulasnout — January 18, 2010 10:18 PM
Using F1 key over type/member seems to do the job well enough.

stan — January 19, 2010 4:27 AM
stan - I'd point out that F1 doesn't work from inside the HTML source code designer (.aspx files), where Dynamic Help did.

Lee Dumond — January 19, 2010 8:31 AM