April Reagan of Microsoft will be talking about Microsoft Help v3 at the WritersUA conference:
“Microsoft Help 3 is a new client help system. This help system has been built from the ground up with simplicity, performance and relevance in mind. It was not a straightforward road in getting the project approved, and with a large legacy content base and complex content scenarios, it took a lot of long and heated design discussions with a will to favor simplicity. The end result is a greatly improved deployment model, a fast underlying architecture based on the Zip storage standard and a beautiful new Windows Presentation Foundation based help viewer featuring a web-browser feel. Initially shipping as the product help system for the next wave of Visual Studio products, this system will become available to all Windows developers in the near future. This will be the first wide release of a help system from Microsoft since Help 1.”
WritersUA is looking like it will be a great conference this year.
“…this system will become available to all Windows developers in the near future…”
Yeah, right. Given the history, it’s really, really hard not to be sceptical about this.
At the MVP meeting in Seattle this week, Microsoft announced Help 3 would first ship with Visual Basic 2010, so that will give everyone some guidance as to when it’s likely to appear.