How do you integrate help into your WPF application. Any recommendations?

Question

This question says it all. If you are writing a WPF application, how do you integrate the application? What is the state of the game in mid-2013?

There seems to be no clear answer to this question after lunch with the search engine, but a few options:

• Write your own helpful tooltip based on the tooltip (but where do you get your data from?)

• Use .CHM files and the Windows Forms help system (seems archaic to me).

• Use Microsoft Help Viewer 1.X or Microsoft Help 2.0.

  • There is some confusion as to what is later / endorsed by MS. Help Viewer 1.X seems to be the recommended option in Microsoft Help 2.0. This does not mean that the names are so similar ...
  • What is the status 2.0? Should we use it? Has it ever been fully deployed?

• Use a third-party product to create help files and link to them somehow - DocToHelp / NetHelp, NetAdvantage online help, etc.

Also, which XAML-based attributes / attributes are used to provide the necessary context? What is the recommended method?

It seems surprising that there is no clear way to support application-based support in WPF.

Answer 1

My real preference is to use a third-party help authorization system to create HTML help.

Then we use WebBrowser to display this help as needed. The authoring system that we use makes it easy to extract one page from the main help (each "topic" is a single HTML file and can be included with full content or not at will).

Of course, it definitely seemed a bit unpleasant hack at first - but as soon as we wrote the basic plumbing (some attached properties for xaml to specify attributes for the contextual location and add behavior to start the help, etc.), it is pretty clean.

One very pleasant advantage for this approach is a single assembly of help systems, which works fine in all contexts - we can include documentation on the Internet, place it locally for use in the browser and use it in context from our application directly.