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Thanks for your feedback jschroedl.

A number of VS 2010 Beta 2 customers have asked why we did not deliver a Keyword Index as part of the new help system. We realize the importance of delivering a keyword index, but we were unable to deliver it in our first release. In this V1.0 release of help system, we first implemented an improved search capability in order to deliver a more familiar, consistent online and offline experience. We then implemented a keyword index feature based on our search catalog. Unfortunately, the results did not meet our quality bar and we determined that this feature would require more work than the Beta 2 timeline allowed. We are looking at implementing it for at future release.

In the meantime, the usage pattern we anticipate is that you'll search for the general concept using full text search and then refine your topic selection using the TOC and related topics. We did anticipate that there would be a period of adjustment for customers. Our hope is that you will try working with the new design and give us feedback that we can use to prioritize the features and fixes that our team delivers in later releases.

I don't WANT a consistent online and offline help experience. I want offline to be even better!

Keyword index is one of the most important parts of Help for the Win32 development I do. For example, I very often open the index and type "Path" expecting to browse the list myriad Win32 PathXXX apis available. If I plaintext search for Path I'll run into zillions of misleading hits.

This is a huge misstep. Also, not this is not Version 1.0! You may call it that but you're exposing your internal components to us. Frankly, I don't care -- this is a step backward.

I absolutely and wholeheartedly agree with jshroedl!

Here's what's missing with the online (and now offline) help experience:

1. The TOC should not scroll with the content, and it should retain its state and position across content navigations. It should also not be filtered by the currently displayed content, i.e. it should always show the ENTIRE hierarchical TOC regardless of what page is currently shown.

2. An index feature is badly needed, as discussed above.

In earlier versions of VS, the offline help experience has been MUCH more usable then the online one. This new approach is simply the online experience hosted of localhost. Consistency between online and offline in this case is a major drawback, rather than something to strive for.

I couldn't agree more - the new offline help is absolutely terrible.

Microsoft, you have it all wrong. People don't use offline help because they're "not on the Internet" or "too lazy to go to the MSDN website". They use it because the user experience is lightyears better than the MSDN website!

The new offline help viewer completely destroyed everything that was good about the old one. No more index. No more framed UI. Now we have a sub-par version of the website with a worse user experience and a "hacky" weirdo kludge that somehow steals HTTP requests. I do NOT want things like that running on my developer machine when I am trying to debug and test software!

What a nightmare. Flush, Cancel, or Kill the Help 3.0 nightmare ASAP and bring back the old viewer until you can deliver a proper user experience, not some hacky webserver!

> "We did anticipate that there would be a period of adjustment for customers"

The "period of adjustment" feels like someone running a cheesegrater down my back. :(

This is an enormous mistake. I cannot believe that anyone is actually considering releasing offline help in this condition. What is the point of having offline help at all if it is worse than online help?

Let me say this very clearly: search is NOT an index! Indexing use cases are completely different from searching use cases. I rely on the index to quickly get me to exactly what I am looking for. Search is incapable of quickly finding what I want because the net it casts is far too big. It is only useful if I have a vague idea of what I am looking for and am willing to wade through a sea of irrelevant results to find it (which most of the time I am not).

If you are only going to include one or the other, either search or index, by far the more important feature is the index! This has to be corrected before VS 2010 goes RTM or offline help will be completely useless and all of the work you have put into the new system will be wasted.

Yes, the help system in VS2010 Beta 2 is awful. I'm not sure what "looking at implementing it for a future release" means - given you said it couldn't fit in the Beta 2 timeline, does that mean we'll see an index etc. in subsequent betas or 2010 RTM? If not I'm probably sticking with VS2005, no amount of VC++ improvements can compensate for this!

Just another comment in support of this. It's very difficult to locate what I want by using search and there's no option to filter my search based on category. Bring back the index (with filters).

I use online help in Visual Studio because it has some other useful features (community content, no space needed on local host). But even online help experience in VS 2010 is worse then in 2008. I originally thought that there is something wrong with my VS 2010 Beta 2 installation - that help system is not installed at all and so Visual Studio redirects me to FireFox showing some page telling that nothing can be found because help is not available.
1) I prefer viewing help inside visual studio, not in external browser. Simply to keep related thinks in related places and not having a new tab in FireFox for every F1 hit. As I have described in 513278 i don't see way how to make VS to show help as tabbed document.
2) When I use help I mostly use it via F1. When I need documentation for some class/method I either locate it in Object Browser and press F1 or I just type in in code on purpose and press F1. This usually took me to right place. Combo box used to appear (top-right of help browser) with choice of topics in case more options are available. I certainly cannot expect this from FireFox!
3) I absolutely refuse something running port 80 on my computer! I need it for development!
4) From time to time I used to got to index and I was really surprised that there is none in VS 2010.
5) What about having index on MSDN online?
6) Help Library manager - this application looks like toy for lamas not like tool for developers. I really prefer seeing all my options in one window. Not having several something which I'm not sure if it is dialog window or navigator page, so I don't know if I have to go back by closing it or if I'm supposed to find some Go back button.
7) Where is Dynamic Help (maybe now I finally have powerful enough computer to use it).
8) Where are Help favorites?
Microsoft does really great job with .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. But starting with Office 2010 every your change to user interface annoys me! (Note: With Office 2010 the problem is not that I don't like ribbons - it's that I hate lack of customization options. And this is same with VS 2010 - IDE is less configurable than 2008!).
So, Microsoft, please, do not remove functionality that many developers like and rely on!

"the usage pattern we anticipate is that you'll search for the general concept using full text search and then refine your topic selection using the TOC and related topics."

You've got that completely backwards. The most useful searching comes from the index, which takes you to a topic where you can later sync to the TOC to see where the topic fits ina broader category of things to get more related info. Starting at the TOC level is completely useless because the TOC is way too big and not organized in a manner the groups everything together.

I have to agree with the others here. This new system of using the web browser is horrible. Help for VS has gone down hill with each succesive version. Anyone remember the "Online books" in the early days of VS 4? (Somewhere the meaning of online shifted from accesible in the app to "out there on the web") THat was great, printable content that printed like it was the manual.

Echoing others, I don't want the same experience online and offline. Online UX is far too limited to be a useful paradigm. A common experience is all well and good IF and ONLY IF you don't dumb down one to meet the other. I want a better experience locally. THis is a major step backwoards that really hursts all the rest of the great work going on in VS because I can't use a tool with a help system that's as bad as this. I'd hate to have to wait for VS2012 and help 4. :-(