Microsoft Help 2.x is a proprietary format for

online help Online help is topic-oriented, procedural or reference information delivered through computer software. It is a form of user assistance. The purpose of most online help is to assist in using a software application, web application or operating sys ...

files, developed by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

and first released in 2001 as a help system for Visual Studio .NET (2002) and

MSDN Library Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) was the division of Microsoft responsible for managing the firm's relationship with developers and testers, such as hardware developers interested in the operating system (OS), and software developers developing ...

. Microsoft Help 2.x is the help engine used in Microsoft Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005/2008 and

Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Novemb ...

and

Office 2010 Microsoft Office 2010 (codenamed Office 14) is a version of Microsoft Office for Microsoft Windows unveiled by Microsoft on May 15, 2009, and released to manufacturing on April 15, 2010, with General availability release, general availability on ...

. Help files are made with the Help 2.0 Workshop (VSHIK), a help authoring tool. The default viewer for Help 2.x files is Microsoft Document Explorer, and there are several third-party viewers available such as

H2Viewer H, or h, is the eighth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''aitch'' (pronounced , plural ''aitches''), or regio ...

and Help Explorer Viewer. Visual Studio 2010 uses a new help engine, Microsoft Help Viewer.

History

* March 2001—

announced Microsoft Help 2.x at WritersUA (formerly WinWriters) conference. * January 2003—Microsoft decided not to release Microsoft Help 2 as a general Help platform. Help 2 remained a Visual Studio Help integration tool. * August 2003— Borland have released C# Builder. Documentation is all in Microsoft Help 2 format and displayed in Microsoft Document Explorer. * December 2005—Microsoft continues support of Help 2 by releasing the Help Integration Wizard which is Visual Studio 2005 compatible. * December 2006—

is released and uses Microsoft Help 2. The Office help viewer is a custom viewer that can only view Office 2007 help. * April 2009—

announced at 2009 WritersUA conference that

Microsoft Help System Microsoft Help Viewer (HV) is the offline help system (local help) developed by Microsoft that ships with versions of Microsoft Windows including and subsequent to Windows 8, as well as Visual Studio 2010 and its associated MSDN Library. Micros ...

1.x (development name was MS Help 3) will ship with Visual Studio 2010.

File format

A Microsoft Help 2.x file has a ".hxs" extension. A compressed .HxS help file (help title) is compiled from a set of topic pages written in a subset of

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

(much like its CHM predecessor), a .HxC main project file, an .HxF include file, a .HxT table of contents, a .HxA attribute definition file, and a number of .HxK indexes (keyword Index, NamedURL index, optional associated and context links indexes). Specifics of the format can be found in an unofficial "ITOLITLS" format specification. An open source "convertlit" tool can be used to decompile the hxs file.

Applications

This format was originally intended only for the help system used by Visual Studio .NET 2002 help, MSDN Library and TechNet, but now it is used in

and some

IDEs Ides or IDES may refer to: Calendar dates * Ides (calendar), a day in the Roman calendar that fell roughly in the middle of the month. In March, May, July, and October it was the 15th day of the month; in other months it was the 13th. **Ides of Mar ...

, such as Borland Developer Studio. An Assistance Platform (AP) help format based on a new XML-based markup language called

Microsoft Assistance Markup Language Microsoft Assistance Markup Language (Microsoft AML, generally referred to as MAML) is an XML-based markup language developed by the Microsoft User Assistance Platform team to provide user assistance ("online help") for the Microsoft Windows Vis ...

was originally part of the Longhorn project. It introduced a "guided help" (active content wizard, ACW) feature that highlights what parts of the screen to interact with. It can also use this information to automate a task if the user accepts. Microsoft eventually decided against including ACW in Windows Vista. The compiled .H1s help format, along with the HelpPane viewer, remained in Windows Vista and Windows 7. It is similar to H2's Hxs format. A third party "xHelpMarkup" tool for compiling and decompiling exists, but it is only a wrapper around the BDD 2007 apcompnt and apss.dll tools.

References

External links

Microsoft Help 2.x
{{Microsoft Windows components Online help

History

File format

Applications

See also

References

External links