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Type: Suggestion
ID: 506760
Opened: 10/30/2009 1:55:45 PM
Access Restriction: Public
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The offline help experience in previous versions of VS is extremely valuable for two main reasons: 1) it allows me as a developer to very QUICKLY find what I'm looking for and 2) it can be explored/browsed in a very discoverable way.

Conversely, the offline help experience in VS2010 is very poor. After giving it some real usage time to give it a chance to grow on me, I think I've figured out the main reasons why I feel it is so severely inadequate.

1. The TOC is broken in several ways:
- It does not retain its state and position between navigations.
- It displays the location only for the currently displayed page and it's path to the root node, which means it can not be independently explored without also moving between pages. This hampers discoverability, because there's no way to get an overview. It also slows navigation, because for each TOC node I want to explore, I have to navigate through content (in some cases several times) to even reach it.
- It scrolls with the content which means I have to scroll to the top to navigate.
- It cannot be resized, which means long topic titles are sometimes truncated.

In my mind, you could fix this by implementing a frames based TOC, and employing some form of AJAX-based lazy loading when expanding nodes to avoid having to refresh the whole frame. This would allow it to be navigated and browsed quickly and irrespective of the content.

2. There is no index. A key component of the previous offline help experience was the ability to do FAST incremental search. For example, start typing "NetTc" and without delay, you see all the entries for the NetTcpBinding class.

3. The use of the browser and local web server means the whole help experience becomes generally SLOW. Having to do a full page postback for each content navigation is bad enough - having to also do a full postback on each TOC navigation is downright horrible!

4. The use of paging (such as when displaying search results) means extra navigational clicks, and contributes to slowing down the whole workflow. Also, there is no discernible way to get back to the TOC from the seach results, except through navigating to one of the results.

I strongly suggest you prioritize improvement of the offline help experience before the final release of VS2010. If you don't, you will make a lot of developers considerably less productive, myself included.

Thanks!
Details (expand)

Version Currently Used

Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Operating System Currently Used

Windows 7

Suggestion

See Description.

Benefits

Faster Development
Improved User Interface
Improved Documentation

Other Benefits

 
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Posted by Shadow Chaser on 10/30/2009 at 2:19 PM
Couldn't agree more. The new help experience is terrible - why on Earth is it running a webserver on localhost?!
Posted by dekurver on 11/1/2009 at 9:43 AM
I agree. I often come across developers that don't even install the documentation, preferring to rely on Google, Code Project, etc. for help. I can only assume that these were the developers the documentation team listened to when it came up with the new system. To emphasize the original points:

1. There MUST be an Index to help with learning and discovery.
2. There MUST be a Sync with TOC feature to help with learning and discovery.
3. There MUST be fixed navigation areas for Language Filter, Members, etc., to assist navigation.
4. The local help MUST be fast, otherwise what's the point?

Basically, if you're going to change the experience you need to make sure the user gets improved value from it. All you've done with the new system is remove a bunch of useful stuff. Personally, I don't see the benefit. I can't even add a dedicated entry for the help to the task bar in Windows 7 next to the one I added for VS. I have to pin the entry in the jump list for the web browser, which means right-click, move up to pinned segment, left-click. Obviously (at least to me) not as good as just left-click.
Posted by Dmitry Osinovsky on 11/1/2009 at 12:07 PM
No Index in VS 2010? Are you kidding me? Index is what I use most often to explore help in VS 2008 when working offline (and I have to work offline really often). TOC is also great thing when you are studying some new technology, and it must retain its state between navigation to be useful. Please don't broke things in such an awful way so I wouldn't regret my decision to go with .NET for our project instead of Java :)
Posted by Microsoft on 11/1/2009 at 11:15 PM
Thanks for reporting this issue. We are routing this suggestion to the product unit who works on that specific feature area. The team will review this suggestion and make a decision on whether they will take it or not.

Thank you,
Visual Studio Product Team
Posted by peter.somos on 11/2/2009 at 2:34 PM
I also miss the index very very much. That is my current main approach to VS2008 documentation.

Search could be improved with autocompletion (like in mediawiki search box http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki)
Posted by Microsoft on 11/3/2009 at 1:25 PM
Thanks Decorum, and others who have posted to this feedback. We've been hearing a lot of feedback particularly around the lack of Index support and are looking at some options of what we may be able to provide for RTM. It may not be part of the default/in-box experience, but something you'd be able to add to your experience.

Regarding the TOC, we've had consistent feedback that on the whole it is lightly and rarely used. We opted to try this streamlined approach - thank you for feedback on that! I suspect we will hear both positive and negative feedback on a number of the decisions we have made for this release. We are keeping the bug you logged active and will revisit as we continue to receive feedback.

Thanks again for taking time to provide the feedback! (and please send more!)

Sincerely,

Paul O'Rear
Library EXperience (LEX)
Microsoft Corporation
Posted by Daniel Stolt on 11/3/2009 at 2:16 PM
Paul,

Thanks you your response on this!

Regarding the TOC:

As Dmitry points out, I think the key benefit provided by the TOC (in its previous shape) is INFORMATION DISCOVERABILITY. When learning a new technology, there is always a phase of exploration in which you don't quite know what you're looking for, you're just trying to get an overview and survey the high level topic before delving deeper into the particular topics you're interested in. In this phase, the ability to SEE WHAT ELSE IS THERE BESIDES WHAT YOU'RE CURRENTLY LOOKING AT is key.

With the new TOC design, I (and others, evidently) feel you have taken away most of that discoverability. This will inevitably lead to less developers even using the documentation to learn a new technology, instead resorting to Google to find specific answers to specific questions. Like "dekurver", I think this is an unfortunate development, firstly because the documentation Microsoft provides for the .NET platform is exceptionally good, and secondly because developers miss out on so much knowledge that they could otherwise apply to their requirements, instead falling into a pattern of very problem-solution-oriented learning.

Regarding the decision to move to a browser-based solution:

My hope was for Document Explorer to evolve as a richer, local, client-side app, utilizing the amazing text rendering and layout capabilities of WPF to take documentation browsing and reading experience to a new level! What you have chosen to do instead is IMHO a huge step backward - as "dekurver" said, removing a bunch of functionality without replacing it with something better. I am deeply saddened that you have chosen to pursue this path...

Please reconsider... at the very least, let us keep Document Explorer as-is.

Thanks,
Daniel
Posted by Shadow Chaser on 11/6/2009 at 9:02 PM
> "It may not be part of the default/in-box experience, but
> something you'd be able to add to your experience."

If you can't fix it, then dump the entire new help system. It's a complete disaster. You aren't delivering *ANY* value to customers. The old help system wasn't perfect - case in point being the seemingly endless "merging" that would occur and lock up the IDE. But the new one is much, much worse.

As a software developer I *do not* want "weird hackery" in my web browser. The whole help webserver and hacking into my networking stack/processes/proxies/whatever on 127.0.0.1 to serve up help content does NOT give me happy feelings when I'm debugging web applications on the same machine. Stay the heck out of my browser experience - the LAST thing I need is someone mucking with it when I'm debugging complex browser issues.

On top of that, the entire "Help in a browser" experience was terrible to begin with. Why do you think so many people installed offline help to begin with? I'm going to be vocal - MSDN online help sucks. No index. Slow searching with irrelevant results. Waiting for AJAX callbacks to complete every time I go to expand a help contents node.

You guys took everything that was bad about the online experience and made it worse. I realize I'm being harsh, but what a disaster. I used to be proud of of Visual Studio's help because it didn't resort to the browser garbage that Adobe and all the others torture me with.

Like I said in the beginning - there is NO customer value here. It's simply to streamline your own internal processes.
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