The question says it all really. If you are writing a WPF application, how are you integrating the application help? What is the state of play in mid-2013?
It seems that there is no clear answer to this from an afternoon with a search engine, but several options:
Write your own fancy tooltip based help (but where are you getting your data from?)
Use .CHM files and the Windows Forms help system (seems archaic to me).
Use Microsoft Help Viewer 1.X or Microsoft Help 2.0.
There is some confusion as to which is more recent / approved of by MS. It appear Help Viewer 1.X might be the recommended option over Microsoft Help 2.0. It doesn't help that the names are so similar...
What is the status of 2.0? Should we use it? Was it ever fully deployed?
Use a third-party product to author your help files and link to them somehow - DocToHelp/NetHelp, NetAdvantage on-line help, etc...
Furthermore, what XAML based mark-up / attributes are you using to provide the necessary context? What is the recommended method?
It seems surprising there is no clear path for supporting application based help in WPF.
My current preference is to use a third party help authorizing system to generate HTML based help.
We then use a WebBrowser to display this help as needed. The authoring system we use makes it fairly easy to extract out a single page from the main help (each "topic" is a single HTML file, and can be included with full contents or not as desired).
Granted, this definitely felt like a bit of a nasty hack at first - but once we wrote the basic plumbing (some attached properties for xaml to specify attributes for context location and add behavior to trigger help, etc), it's fairly clean.
One very nice advantage to this approach, however, is a single help system build works perfectly in all contexts - we can include the documentation online, expose it locally for use in a browser, and use it with context from within our application directly.
Related
I have created an website/application using Angular2. The infrastructure is all set, I have routing completed, sass being processed etc.
I have sections (components) on this website that will display current web standards for our designs (buttons, forms, copy). The purpose of this site is to give our developers a copy/paste solution for markup and sass.
We will most likely create our own css library but they will still need a good visual reference of what each class does and a copy/paste solution.
I know how to develop all the standards, what I don't know how to do is have the DOM display options for the user to copy/paste the code. I could manually enter the code into or tags but this will be hard to maintain and not very clean approach. I'd like to find some solution that will utilize my code and create these tags at run time.
Googling this question leads down the road of using living style guide generators, which i don't want to use... why? I like having the functionality of controlling my own layout and scaling my standards as I see fit with our own technology.
Any ideas?
After exploring this even further I ended circling yet again on documentation tools (KSS) where I would need to rebuild my entire style guide for this functionality using markdown and or JDOCs.
Solution!
Use CodePen, its free to signup however there are some nice to have features for a monthly fee. I easily created my code here using SASS, HTML and CSS libraries. CodePen has a great EMBED feature whereas I could copy/paste html or iframe right to my styleguide.
Problem is now solved, and we have have a dynamic Web & UI Styleguide.
Hope this method helps others in my situation.
I posted a question on the Drupal forum about whether I should build my database in Drupal using content-types or the database abstraction layer and schema module: [here][1]
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
[1]: https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/98020/should-i-use-content-types-or-database-abstraction-layer
I'd recommend using content types.
For a PHP coder, sometimes using the Drupal User Interface to build things feels non-intuitive, but in the long run you're going to benefit a lot from doing things "the drupal way.
Once you reverse engineer your need into a content type and all it's associated fields, install the modules that provide those field types and set things up, you'll start to see the benefits.
Validation on all the data-entry froms will already be done for you.
Multiple display modes are available for your data (email addresses can be shown with or without mailto: links, images can be shown using any of Drupal's image styles)
Integration with other Drupal modules already exists, and will be supported (almost anything built with fields is available to views)
By writing your own schema you'll need to handle all these things yourself (and more), and not just once, but you'll need to maintain all that custom code over time.
Learn to leverage the community and all the great work that's been done already, you'll save yourself time in the long run :)
What i see you are going to have shop site.
You may tray this:
https://drupal.org/project/commerce_kickstart
, i've found it usefull once. It's drupal distribution with nice themed shop rady to use straight forward.
And of course do it with content type + views + entity reference modules.
Here is a link to a comment that answers the question I asked. It backs up what arpitr outlined in their answer on the orignal post on the drupal forum, whose answer is also in agreement with jenlampton's suggestion above.
https://drupal.org/comment/7848011#comment-7848011
I will implement my system using node entities until the need arises to build a custom entity (if it ever does).
The top answer in this forum give a good way to evaluate whether to use nodes or custom build an entity:
https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/22586/when-is-it-appropriate-to-create-an-entity-versus-just-adding-a-new-content-type
I am planning to make a web application, using silverlight for frontend. requirement is: this frontend will be just an empty shell, and it must be language independent. it will get everything it needs to display and use from server, therefore making it language independent.
i tried to find tutorials, but there is nothing.
as far as i understand, silverlight uses xaml for all its data, so just generating it with whatever language i want shouldn't be a problem. but i don't have any silverlight experience or knowledge, so i'm not sure what is the best way to do this. for example, i don't know how will new content be generated, and what kind of structure silverlight requires.
can anyone give me some starting points?
Your requirements are rather demanding. If i can summarise:
silverlight will be the front end (or container)
you don't know what it will be showing
the content may be dynamically generated
everything, including the visual content, will be retrieved from the server
If i have misunderstood then by all means correct me or adjust your question.
Those requirements are not trivial, especially when you have no prior experience in Silverlight. Fetching data from the server is a normal behaviour in Silverlight, but fetching any generated UI content will be a slow and inefficient use of the technology platform. Silverlight is delivered via the browser, and runs on the client. If you are going to have generated UI, then you may want to consider using straight HTML instead (you can generate the contents using ASP.Net or a scripting language such as PHP). Alternatively, you can generate your required UI views from within the Silverlight app itself by either swapping in and out the appropriate pre-built piece of UI (or controls), programmatically adding new controls into the visual tree, or by loading XAML using the XamlReader class.
This answer may or may not help you much, but like i said before - put some more specific details into your question and you will get more specific answers (either add comments under your question, or post a new more specific question if you cannot edit your current one).
Edit: i have just come across this blog article from Jeff Prosise explaining the use of the INavigationContentLoader interface in Silverlight 4 to dynamically load pages from either remotely or locally. It is a detailed write-up, with a lot of code samples, it may be of use to you.
I would suggest you start at http://Silverlight.net
The "Learn" section has lots of videos that can get you started. http://www.silverlight.net/learn/
I'm just starting up a new, big project that will be using WPF for the front end. I'm looking for some kind of solution for an integrated help system. The basic use case for this is that the user needs to be able to reach context sensitive help at any time when using the system. The help content should be localized and displayed within the application (not popup an external .chm file).
I'm looking for real world experience in creating and/or using a third party system that can handle the complete flow for this, including a work flow for localizing the help content. Any input is appreciated! Thank you.
One suggestion is to compose help as FlowDocuments. They're simple to compose (and you can whip up an editor using RichTextBox. They can be stored as resources in your assembly and you just use a FlowDocumentReader to view them. That basically lets you fully integrate help into your app the way you want it without needing any external tools or controls.
How about using tooltips ? Wpf tooltips can have any kind of content... can't think of a more integrated help system ;o)
Here is an article by Pete O'Hanlon Easy help with WPF
I suppose you can customize this solution to fit your needs.
Is there a particular reason that you can't popup an external .chm file, or is it for aesthetic purposes? If you must wrap your own implementation, you might want to look at this article on Code Project. It's not WPF specific, but it should serve as a real starting point for you.
I really need a way of loading a .ppt document in my wpf application. Can anyone give me a hint, code sample?
Checkout the following discussion thread. Also Dr.WPF got an interesting article that might help you as well: Hosting Office in WPF Application
However consider license costs will be quite high for your scenario...
According to this artice the DSO Framer is no longer supported. Have to look for something else.
You may need to elaborate a bit more on your particular need to get a practical answer.
I don't think hosting PowerPoint (ppt) is a good option because it requires ppt to be installed on the target machine.... and if the target machine has ppt then you can use its API to save the document as HTML and open it in a WebBrowser control.
If the target machine doesn't have powerpoint you may look into some online file conversion service and try hooking up there to convert to HTML and still use WebBrowser control.
I definitely don't recommend wasting your time with DSOFramer - it's very unstable at best and it will just feel like you're one step away from making it work for a while but it doesn't work.
Another option is of course to write your own parser for ppt files, the OfficeOpenXML version of the files is definitely "parseable". I've done that for Word docx and it's relatively easy to get the course data out of the document - say shapes, text... - but the devil there is in the details. There are a zillion little features to implement.