The Microsoft® Help team has decided not to release Microsoft Help 2 as a general Help platform. This is primarily in response to customer feedback that the most important thing is providing a standard Help experience on everybody's machine.

With that in mind, we are focusing our work efforts on providing a great Help experience in the next client release of Windows (codename "Longhorn") rather than on releasing an interim solution that is not integrated with the operating system.

While Microsoft develops future Help technologies, we encourage Help authors to continue using HTML Help 1.x. Visual Studio® .NET has great support for integrating HTML Help 1.x content into the applications you build, see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vbcon/html/vbconApplicationAssistance.asp.

There are also many 3rd party tools available that provide a rich authoring experience for HTML Help 1.x content (for some examples, see http://www.winwriters.com/restools.htm [not a Microsoft site]).

The Help 2 engine will continue to be provided with several of Microsoft's developer-related products, including Visual Studio .NET, MSDN® Library, Microsoft .NET Framework SDK, and Microsoft Office Developer. Component developers and others who need to integrate their Help content into the Help system in Visual Studio .NET can do so using the Visual Studio Help Integration Kit (VSHIK). See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/hwmscExtendingNETHelp.asp for more information. There are also 3rd party tools that provide support for Help 2, including FAR HTML (http://www.helpware.net/FAR/index.html [not a Microsoft site]) and ComponentOne® Doc-To-Help® (http://www.componentone.com/helptools.aspx [not a Microsoft site]).

Shane McRoberts
Lead Program Manager, Microsoft Help

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