Chapter 14: Help and Application-Embedded Support

Overview

Help: Is it the final polish on a professional application or a time-consuming chore? It all depends on the audience, but most commercial applications need a support center where users can seek assistance when they become confused or disoriented. Without this basic aid, you (or your organization's technical support department) are sure to be buried under an avalanche of support calls.

In this chapter, you learn:

How to integrate Windows Help files into your applications. You look at launching Help manually, and using the context-sensitive HelpProvider.

When to design your own Help, and how you can weave it into an application using an extensible database-based or XML-based framework.

How to break down the limits of Help and design application-embedded support: user assistance that's integrated into the software it documents, instead of slapped on in a separate file as an afterthought. You explore some basic approaches like affordances and wizards (through visual inheritance), and a few advanced techniques like animated agents.