I'm looking to create a indexable help file for a winforms app, but how do you get started?
The Microsoft MSDN is rubbish, it says "create a new project" but doesn't specify which type to create.
How do I go about creating a help file for my applications?
Are you looking for this
Integrating "Help" into WinForms Application?
Maybe this doesn't count as a real answer:
I would vote against those help files. 5-6 years back we had real context sensitive help files on a per-dialog-basis in our applications, and it was a lot of effort to maintain those.
Therefore, we changed this to shipping "simple" PDF files that appear on F1. We never got any complaints from users.
Recently we started migrating this to real HTML websites with lots of individual pages, a search function, "prev" and "next" navigation, and a printer-friendly format. This enables us to update the manual much quicker and makes it more "linkable" compared to PDF.
Personally, I really never get warm with those help files. E.g. I still do not understand why some files need to be trusted, before I can open and view them.
Related
Hi I am trying to pull this string from courseweb.hopkinsschools.org and display it on my own asp.net application. I have been looking for a long time for a tutorial but nothing works. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Picture of String needed:
String
When I started doing work with websites and interfacing with other websites, I originally wanted to do what you're talking about, reading the text from pages, because thats how we as people interface with computers and websites.
But that is not how computers should ever interface with other websites unless absolutely necessary.
Moodle has an API for such things like course management. Its kind of difficult to find information on, but its called Moodle Web Services if I remember quickly. I'll add a link back if I can find it.
What these will do is let you access moodle in a computer friendly way, ie. a way your computer can easily understand, instead of trying to read webpages.
Edit
Here are some resources to get you started:
https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Web_services
https://code.google.com/p/mnet-csharp/
https://delog.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/integrating-a-c-app-with-moodle-using-xml-rpc/
https://delog.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/integrating-c-app-with-moodle-2/
I am currently developing a Word-Completion application in C# and after getting the UI up and running, keyboard hooks set, and other things of that nature, I came to the realization that I need a WordList. The only issue is, I cant seem to find one with the appropriate information. I also don't want to spend an entire week formatting and gathering a WordList by hand.
The information I want is something like "TheWord, The definition, verb/etc."
So, it hit me. Why not download a basic word list with nothing but words(Already did this; there are about 109,523 words), write a program that iterates through every word, connects to the internet, retrieves the data(definition etc) from some arbitrary site, and creates XML data from said information. It could be 100% automated, and I would only have to wait for maybe an hour depending on my internet connection speed.
This however, brought me to a few questions.
How should I connect to a site to look up these words? << This my actual question.
How would I read this information from the website?
Would I piss off my ISP or the website for that matter?
Is this a really bad idea? Lol.
How do you guys think I should go about this?
EDIT
Someone noticed that Dictionary.com uses the word as a suffix in the url. This will make it easy to iterate through the word file. I also see that the webpage is stored in XHTML(Or maybe just HTML). Here is the source for the Word "Cat". http://pastebin.com/hjZj6AC1
For what you marked as your actual question - you just need to download the data from the website and find what you need.
A great tool for this is CsQuery which allows you to use jquery selectors.
You could do something like this:
var dom = CQ.CreateFromUrl("http://www.jquery.com");
string definition = dom.Select(".definitionDiv").Text();
I'm trying to create a wpf application such as a movies library because i would like to manage and sort out my movies with a pretty interface.
I'd like to create a library with all my movies getting information from the web, but i don't know how very well.
I thought to get the information from a web site, for example imdb, but i don't know if it's legally to capture html from page to get the nested information.
It's my first desktop application and I would also like to know if it is necessary to create a database within the project and then create a setup project with specified script for deploy it.
Sorry for the confusion but i would like to know too much things :)
Thanks a lot in advance.
The legality of web scraping is a grey area. See my question, "Legality of Web Scraping vs Normal Use" and the corresponding answers for some insight.
Even if the legality is not a problem, web scraping is a flimsy approach because the webpage structure may change without notice, making your application suddenly useless until you update it to the new format. You are much better off using some sort of web API (if the site providing the information offers it).
Whether you need a database or not depends entirely on what your application will be doing and how you design it - it's not something any of us can tell you.
Same goes for the setup project - in fact I wouldn't worry about that until you actually have a working application. Take it step by step and keep the scope within control.
Yes I did not think about api.
It's a great idea, maybe use "themoviedb".
But if i create an application based on it, that has to show all the movies that you have stored on your hdd and get , for example, the posters, the description and the ranking, i have to create a database according to you?
Thanks a lot.
I am not sure how to start solving this problem so any suggestions will be of help.
My client has a number of static HTML pages running into hundreds of files. These under go updates every now and then and are overwritten on the website. We list these pages on the website via a simple left hand side explorer mimicking the folder structure in which these files are given to us.
We now want to give the ability to search these files and display matching results. Doing a brute search through such a large number of files is going to be very time consuming. Matching related words (for example plurals, misspellings etc) is also desirable. Showing results in the order of popularity would be a useful feature. I am not sure how to get started on this. Should we pre-process the html files after every update for instance? Any recommended indexing libraries available in .NET? What little programming has been done on the website has been done using C#.
Thanks
MS
Lucene.net may be of interest.
I´d first write a simple program to transfer all those files contents to a database. Then you could implement your search properly without having to read all files every time.
I am not sure if its within your budget, but Google can do it for you as user1161318 pointed out.
Try Google Site Search - http://www.google.co.uk/enterprise/search/products_gss.html
I want to create a help file opens when pressed F1 anytime. How to create it and include to code?
You are asking two things which are separate issues:
Create a help file.
This can be tricky depending on how you do it. There are many different options, some launch a web browser to a online help while others launch a help viewer of some kind. I have also seen people having simple help viewer implemented in simple controls like some kind of browser control or rich text viewer. To create a external file (like a *.chm file) I would use a commercial package like robohelp, there are SDKs from Microsoft, but packages like RoboHelp makes lift so much easier.
Launch the help
To get the help to be displayed you normally (in the case of an *.chm file or an web browser) need to launch the viewer program. The help SDK from Microsoft contains help for this, but you may also just lauch the program as any other program. Take a look at the System.Diagnostics.Process class.
If you want to create a CHM help file you may check out HelpNDoc which is a perfect tool to create PDF,HTML and CHMs instantly. If it comes to launching, mrz is also perfectly right.
There is a help SDK that microsoft provides
check it out:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms670169
Im assuming this is what your looking for?
you could set F1 to one of these HTML pages?
If your program is rather simple, a single HTML file opened in the user's default browser should be ok. But if Your application is a bit more complex, there's no real alternative to a chm file.
You might also include a PDF which describes common use-cases. (Like a book about using your software)
You can create your help in HTML format and for viewing, you can create a Form which has an embedded browser in it, and load the index (or whatever you call the first page) in the browser.