context sensitive help

[quwiltw]

Anyone know if there is a way to get the "Whats 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 "Whats 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 dont even know where to start.

 

[Derek Stone]

"Whats This?" help is meant for dialogs, which shouldnt have minimize or maximize buttons. Your main application window shouldnt require "Whats This?" help. Instead a "Help > Contents" menu should be available to the user.

 

[quwiltw]

"shouldnt require "Whats This?""?, why not? Anyway, I think I will just look at putting it under the Help menu along with "Contents" Ill have to look at how to do that.

 

[Derek Stone]

Dialogs often require "Whats 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 shouldnt have to hit a button to figure out what something does. If they need to they obviously havent used Windows for that long, and simply havent gotten used to the common interface elements.

 

[Volte]

Tooltips are probably a good solution to what you want. They wouldnt
go into much detail like Whats 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 Forms 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, Ive got a requirement for tooltips too My customer was very active in the requirements analysis process, which Im 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 "Whats 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, its hard to argue.

 

[Derek Stone]

I dont see any "Whats 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 Im either blind, choosing not to see them or correct.

 

[quwiltw]

Youre correct that its not exposed via a help button on the toolbar. But when you said...

Your main application window shouldnt require "Whats This?" help.

... I switched to talking about "Whats 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)