context sensitive help

[quwiltw]

Anyone know if there is a way to get the "What's This" question mark in the title bar of the form to co-exist with the minimize/maximize buttons? They appear to be mutually exclusive. I can currently turn on the "What's This" only if I disable the minimize/maximize buttons.

[divil]

From the help: The value of the HelpButton property is ignored if the maximize or minimize boxes are shown.

 

I guess not.

[quwiltw]

Yep, I saw that. I figured someone had surely gotten around it somehow. I don't even know where to start.

[Derek Stone]

"What's This?" help is meant for dialogs, which shouldn't have minimize or maximize buttons. Your main application window shouldn't require "What's This?" help. Instead a "Help > Contents" menu should be available to the user.

[quwiltw]

"shouldn't require "What's This?""?, why not? Anyway, I think I will just look at putting it under the Help menu along with "Contents" I'll have to look at how to do that.

[Derek Stone]

Dialogs often require "What's This?" help since their numerous options can be confusing to a user. Main application windows should look clean and option free for the most part. In other words the user shouldn't have to hit a button to figure out what something does. If they need to they obviously haven't used Windows for that long, and simply haven't gotten used to the common interface elements.

[Volte]

Tooltips are probably a good solution to what you want. They wouldn't

go into much detail like 'What's This', but they should give a short

description of what the control does.

 

You can give each control a tooltip (what you get when you hold

the mouse over the control) by adding a Tooltip control to your form,

and then in the Form's constructor (or the Form_Load event), you

can use code such as the following:

With ToolTip1
   .SetToolTip(Button1, "This is a tooltip")
   .SetToolTip(Button2, "This is another tooltip")
End With

Then the control 'Button1' will have the tooltip text "This is a

tooltip", and the control 'Button2' will have the tooltip text "This is

another tooltip". You could use resource files and XML to store all

of the tooltip strings and controls and then automate the tooltips

if you wanted, but if there are not too many controls you want to

have tooltips, this way would be the easiest.

[quwiltw]

Yeah, I've got a requirement for tooltips too:) My customer was very active in the requirements analysis process, which I'm beginning to think was a bad thing:) My app is designed for internationalization too so the resource files will be there. BTW, Word, Outlook, Project, and TextPad, which are all targeted at dumb end users all have "What's This?" help on the main app level available. I tried your argument in the requirements gathering process and after getting a list of these sorts of apps that are examples, it's hard to argue.

[Derek Stone]

I don't see any "What's This?" help button installed anywhere in the main application windows of the Microsoft Office applications. As I said, you need to place this feature in the Help menu, as Office has done. So I'm either blind, choosing not to see them or correct.

[quwiltw]

You're correct that it's not exposed via a help button on the toolbar. But when you said...

Your main application window shouldn't require "What's This?" help.

... I switched to talking about "What's This?" as functionality rather than how you get to it. In that same response, you talked about Help->Contents, which I took you as talking about the regular old help (which I also have to support)