Once you’ve created an AppWizard application with the Context-Sensitive Help option, it’s easy to try out the help support provided by the framework and AppWizard.
From the Build menu, click Rebuild All. The first time you build this application, the development environment automatically compiles the AppWizard-generated Help Project files as part of the project build process. You don’t need to compile them separately until you begin modifying them.
Once the project has been built, you can run the application and try out the various help options. Here are some suggestions for what to try:
This invokes the application Help file generated for you by AppWizard, displaying the Contents tab of the Help Topics dialog box. The Contents tab already contains two top-level topics: Menus, which expands to display the menu topics AppWizard generated for the application; and a place-holder topic that you will replace with your application-specific topics.
You’ll see all the topics AppWizard provided for you. They describe the standard menus that the framework provides. Continue choosing topics for a particular menu, such as the File menu, until you see a topic for a specific menu item or dialog box, such as the Print Preview command or the Print Setup dialog box. You’ll see that the Help file is already quite robust.
Select an index entry, and then click Display. Again you’ll see that the skeleton Help file already contains much relevant information, implemented in a useful help structure.
Follow the simple instructions for the Find Setup Wizard, which sets up the full-text search capabilities of the Windows help engine. Once finished, your simple Help system suddenly becomes more sophisticated — the user can type in words or phrases, and if there is a match in any of the AppWizard-generated Help topics, that topic appears in the topic list. Click Display to see the topic.
When you add new files to your Help system, recompile, and run the Find Setup Wizard again, the Windows Help engine re-creates this full-text search index, incorporating the text in your new topics seamlessly.