Microsoft Help Viewer (HV) is the offline help system (local help) 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, Washing ...

that ships with versions of

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

including and subsequent to

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...

, as well as

Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such a ...

and its associated

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 Viewer 1.x supersedes

Microsoft Help 2 Microsoft Help 2.x is a proprietary format for online help files, developed by Microsoft and first released in 2001 as a help system for Visual Studio .NET (2002) and MSDN Library. Microsoft Help 2.x is the help engine used in Microsoft Visual ...

which is the help system used by

Microsoft Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such a ...

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 ...

. It is shipped with VS 2010. Microsoft Help Viewer 2.x is backwards-compatible with 1.x and is shipped with the operating system as well as VS 2012+. Although Microsoft Help Viewer was referred to as MS Help 3.x during development, it is a wholly new product and technically unrelated to

. With the growing need for a general Unicode-based help system, has become the default help system for

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

History

* Jan 2008 - April Reagan S PMblogs that

will replace

. * Apr 2009 - At WritersUA 2009 conference April Reagan and Anand Raman announced Microsoft Help 3 will ship with

. * Nov 2009 - Preview of new offline help ships with the VS 2010 Beta 2. * Jan 2010 - Formal name changed from Microsoft Help 3.0 to Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0 * April 2010 - Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0 is RTM (Release to Manufacturing) as part of the Visual Studio 2010 release. * March 2011 - Microsoft Help Viewer 1.1 ships with Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio 2010. * August 2012 - Microsoft Help Viewer 2.0 ships with Visual Studio 2012 and the Windows 8 OS. The HelpPane Viewer is found in Windows 10. The version appears to be 2.3.

User Experience

The user experience for Microsoft Help Viewer 1.x is that topics can be viewed in any installed

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

– a separate application, such as the

Microsoft Document Explorer 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, Washingt ...

included with Microsoft Help 2, is not necessary. The browser-based model is meant to provide a more lightweight navigation, downloading, and reading experience than earlier help-viewer models. Visual Studio 2010 includes a

taskbar A taskbar is an element of a graphical user interface which has various purposes. It typically shows which programs are currently running. The specific design and layout of the taskbar varies between individual operating systems, but generally a ...

applet in the Windows notification area (system tray) that arbitrates between viewing offline help and online help in the browser when F1 is pressed, and resolves help topic

URI Uri may refer to: Places * Canton of Uri, a canton in Switzerland * Úri, a village and commune in Hungary * Uri, Iran, a village in East Azerbaijan Province * Uri, Jammu and Kashmir, a town in India * Uri (island), an island off Malakula Islan ...

s to the proper topic page. It also includes a "library manager" application to manage the download, installation and uninstallation of help topics on the system, as well as whether to prefer online help when connected to the Internet. Microsoft Help Viewer 2.0 uses a COM runtime library, so the taskbar applet is no longer used. The format is unchanged. The runtime API is accessible via .NET dlls used in VS2012 and Windows 8; they are equivalent except for a name change. VS2012 ships a more sophisticated toolkit (HlpViewer and HlpCtntMgr), while Windows 8 only has a one-pane HelpPane program.

File format

Help files from Microsoft Help Viewer have a file extension. They are ordinary

Zip file ZIP is an archive file format that supports lossless data compression. A ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed. The ZIP file format permits a number of compression algorithms, though DEFLATE is the ...

s containing HTML documents. Special meta tags are provided for navigation, and there is support for signing the help bundle.

References

External links

Microsoft Help Viewer documentation

MSHC tools from helpware
{{Microsoft Windows components Online help

History

User Experience

File format

See also

References

External links