winforms Help Integration

You can provide help for Forms and Controls in a Windows Forms Applications in different ways. You can show a pop-up help, open a CHM file or a URL. You can show context-sensitive help for Forms, Controls and dialogs.

HelpProvider Component

You can setup a HelpProvider component to provide context sensitive help for component. This way when the user press F1 key or Help button of form, you can automatically:

• Show a context sensitive help pop-up for controls
• Open a CHM file based on context (Show table of content, Show a keyword or index, show a topic)
• Navigate to a URL using default browser

Help Class

You can use Help class in code, to provide these kinds of help:

• Show a help pop-up for a control
• Open a CHM file based on context (Show table of content, Show a keyword or index, show a topic)
• Navigate to a URL using default browser

HelpRequested Event

You can handle HelpRequested event of Control objects or Form to perform custom actions when the user press F1 or click on Help button of form.

Help Button of Form

You can setup the Form to show Help button on title-bar. This way, if the user click on Help button, the cursor will change to a ? cursor and after click on any point, any context-sensitive help associated with the control using HelpProvider will be show.

Help button of MessgeBox and CommonDialogs

You can provide help for MessageBox, OpenFileDialog, SaveDialog and ColorDialog using Help button of the components.

ToolTip Component

You can use ToolTip component to display some help text when the user points at controls. A ToolTip can be associated with any control.

Note

Using HelpProvider and Help class You can show compiled Help files (.chm) or HTML files in the HTML Help format. Compiled Help files provide a table of contents, an index, search capability, and keyword links in pages. Shortcuts work only in compiled Help files. You can generate HTML Help 1.x files by using HTML Help Workshop. For more information about HTML Help, see "HTML Help Workshop" and other HTML Help topics at Microsoft HTML Help.