Skin drop-down select available, even though no change

[mattf]

I'm new to DotNet Help, just trying it out. I selected a skin for my DNH output, but it didn't have any effect. I see that there are very old posts acknowledging that you can't change the skin in DNH, so my question is, why does version 6 still allow you to select a skin when you've chosen DNH as your output type above? Either a) I didn't use it properly, or else b) this has been broken all along, which kinda makes me nervous. I start to wonder if this is one of those situations where MadCap throws a product into a space early, then ignores it for five years before cleaning up and making a product usable (I gave up on trying to use Capture's integration with Flare).

What is your (you, yes you, whoever reads this) impression of DotNet Help and the viewer? Is it just half-baked? This forum brings up a lot of problems and I don't see a lot of solutions yet. Should I steer clear of DNH?

Thanks for any and all input.

Matt

[Robotman]

Hi Matt,

I raised some issues in January 2009 and with the release of Flare v6 I haven't yet had a chance to reinvestigate.

http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... f=7&t=7973

We're still not currently using DNH although as noted in the post, it's still a priority. It does (unfortunately) seem a slightly half-arsed approach at the moment.

[Andrew Heard]

Hi Matt,
We're still not currently using DNH although as noted in the post, it's still a priority. It does (unfortunately) seem a slightly half-arsed approach at the moment.

Can I ask what else you are using? And developing in Flare I presume?

I'm working on a new ground-up project built using WPF and .NET. Decision time is upon me, and it's looking like I'll have to abandon DotNet Help. I presume that WebHelp would be the most favoured format? I'd prefer to have context-sensitive help embedded in the application window.

[mattf]

We decided to hold off on DNH, but we still wanted to have some help embedded in the UI. My dev team was gracious enough to give me some real estate at the bottom of each "tab" or "page" in our app, just a few lines' worth, but I can give a lot of basic instruction in that space and refer the user to specific places in the WebHelp for the details. The app pulls in this text from some XML documents. Then, because they don't want to edit this help, they also created a nifty li'l app for me that enables me to edit the XML docs and also preview the end result, sort of like Flare's XML and WYSIWYG editors. For the WebHelp and PDF I'm using Flare 6.1.

We're commited to moving in the direction of CSH, but we need DNH to be baked a little more before we can launch with it.