Dotnethelp Tutorial

[jbarker]

Hello All,

I have my help created in Flare and published. I have the help viewer installed, a trial of Visual Studio along with VSTO installed and I believe everything is in order. Being a 'noob' to Visual Studio I just need a step by step tutorial on how to create a package for Office that will install my Flare output as dynamic help (similar to the dynamic help Flare uses). I've read through the reference material and guides and even taken a look at the sample applications provided with the SDK. The process to link my Flare output to an Office add-in and tieing everything together is something I need help with. To that end, how do I specify an area of an Office application, like Outlook 2010's Backstage View, to trigger the dynamic help for Backstage View? From everything I've scoured on the internet, it appears to be a fairly straight forward process to someone who is familiar with Visual Studio (again, which I am not).

Are there any step-by-step turorials that can help me with this?
Thanks in advance for any help provided.

[RamonS]

Welcome to the forums!
You might want to post that question on a developer forum as well. I wish I could help...

[jbarker]

Thanks for the feedback. I posted the question/request earlier but no feedback yet. We'll see.
Would be nice if a Flare developer could write up a nice little tutorial on the subject

Thanks again.

[RamonS]

Maybe this helps?
http://webhelp.madcapsoftware.com/flare ... cation.htm

[jbarker]

I've read through that, thanks. Unfortunately, many of the resources, help files and such I've found basically say to hand off to a developer, then the instructions for the developer are all pretty high level. That being, a handful of instructions that would be aimed at(and make sense to) a seasoned VS developer to take and run with. My background is more xml, js and ActionScript so I guess I was just hoping to find a 'dummies' step-by-step on the Visual Studio side of things to help me tie it all together. Oh well, I guess the only real solution is to go sit in a corner and cry. harhar

Thanks again for your help.

[RamonS]

Yea, that is why I recommended to post your question in a developer forum. You might also try a local Dot Net User Group. They are in every major and even not so major area and you may find a helpful soul here. As for us TWs, we typically hand this off to a developer.
What you could do is use WebHelp. It has about the same if not more features than DotNetHelp and is much easier to hook into, because all you do is call a URL and specify a window to show it in (and even that part is optional).

Did you see this site? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 80%29.aspx
It is a Microsoft tutorial for making Office add-ins - or at least that is what it looks like. Maybe that gives some more pointers. Microsoft has excellent tutorials, which just happen to be hard to find between all the other rubble that they have on their sites.