Question

We want to implement a application help and documentation system. It should be based on HTML, because there are a lot of existing files and it gives us the most flexibility. Currently we use CHM files. We want to enable internal people (not developers) to edit the contents.

We thought of a stand-alone application that supports TOC, indexing (tags), search, etc. We also thought of using a local web server.

Until now our application uses pure C#, it would be good to keep this.

We are totally clean of web/asp knowledge, so the question is:
Where is a good place to start?

Was it helpful?

Solution 2

Finally we ended up implementing a local HTTP server:

  1. Internal people creates HTML content within our internal network
  2. Our own build-tool creates the TOC and a search index and packs all content to a zipped file
  3. The zipped file is packed into the application installation
  4. When the end-user call help from within our application, the local http server is started
  5. The HTTP server uses the HttpListener class
  6. With this, it is possible to have some HTTP queries for special tasks like starting tools of our application by clicking a link without interception of the browser

OTHER TIPS

You can use documentation apps like SandCastle

Which use your XML documentation in your code to generate a help file.

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