Using Help

Visual Studio provides extensive help features. The Help menu commands are summarized in Fig. 2.23.

Figure 2.23. Help menu commands.

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Command

Description

How Do I

Contains links to relevant topics, including how to upgrade programs and learn more about Web services, architecture and design, files and I/O, data, debugging and more.

Search

Finds help articles based on search keywords.

Index

Displays an alphabetized list of topics you can browse.

Contents

Displays a categorized table of contents in which help articles are organized by topic.

Dynamic help (Fig. 2.24) is an excellent way to get information quickly about the IDE and its features. It provides a list of articles pertaining to the "current content" (i.e., the selected items). To open the Dynamic Help window, select Help > Dynamic Help. Then, when you click a word or component (such as a form or control), links to help articles appear in the Dynamic Help window. The window lists help topics, code samples and other relevant information. There is also a toolbar that provides access to the How Do I, Search, Index and Contents help features.

Figure 2.24. Dynamic Help window.

Visual Studio also provides context-sensitive help, which is similar to dynamic help, except that it immediately displays a relevant help article rather than presenting a list of articles. To use context-sensitive help, click an item, such as the form, and press the F1 key. Figure 2.25 displays help articles related to a form.

Figure 2.25. Using context-sensitive help.

The Help options can be set in the Options dialog (accessed by selecting Tools > Options...). To display all the settings that you can modify (including the settings for the Help options), make sure that the Show all settings checkbox in the lower-left corner of the dialog is checked (Fig. 2.26). To change whether the Help is displayed internally or externally, select Help on the left, then locate the Show Help using: drop-down list on the right. Depending on your preference, selecting External Help Viewer displays a relevant help article in a separate window outside the IDE (some programmers like to view Web pages separately from the project on which they are working in the IDE). Selecting Integrated Help Viewer displays a help article as a tabbed window inside the IDE

Figure 2.26. Options dialog displaying Help settings.

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Using Visual Programming to Create a Simple Program Displaying Text and an Image

Preface

Index

    Introduction to Computers, the Internet and Visual C#

    Introduction to the Visual C# 2005 Express Edition IDE

    Introduction to C# Applications

    Introduction to Classes and Objects

    Control Statements: Part 1

    Control Statements: Part 2

    Methods: A Deeper Look

    Arrays

    Classes and Objects: A Deeper Look

    Object-Oriented Programming: Inheritance

    Polymorphism, Interfaces & Operator Overloading

    Exception Handling

    Graphical User Interface Concepts: Part 1

    Graphical User Interface Concepts: Part 2

    Multithreading

    Strings, Characters and Regular Expressions

    Graphics and Multimedia

    Files and Streams

    Extensible Markup Language (XML)

    Database, SQL and ADO.NET

    ASP.NET 2.0, Web Forms and Web Controls

    Web Services

    Networking: Streams-Based Sockets and Datagrams

    Searching and Sorting

    Data Structures

    Generics

    Collections

    Appendix A. Operator Precedence Chart

    Appendix B. Number Systems

    Appendix C. Using the Visual Studio 2005 Debugger

    Appendix D. ASCII Character Set

    Appendix E. Unicode®

    Appendix F. Introduction to XHTML: Part 1

    Appendix G. Introduction to XHTML: Part 2

    Appendix H. HTML/XHTML Special Characters

    Appendix I. HTML/XHTML Colors

    Appendix J. ATM Case Study Code

    Appendix K. UML 2: Additional Diagram Types

    Appendix L. Simple Types

    Index



    Visual C# How to Program
    Visual C# 2005 How to Program (2nd Edition)
    ISBN: 0131525239
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2004
    Pages: 600

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