Help in Microsoft tools used to be great. Of course, that was ten years ago. In Access 97 or VB (was it VB 6 back then?), I could hit F1 and within two or three seconds the topic would pop up and show me concise information in a well-structured help file. It doesn't take over my screen. Searching is fast. Freaking brilliant!
That was the pinnacle of Microsoft Help, at least for software developers, before .chm files and whatever this new crap is in Vista.
Fast forward to 2007. I'm in the venerable Visual Studio 2005. I have a dual core processor, big ass hard drive and more RAM than I ever thought I would need. I land on a .NET Framework object instantiation in my code and hit F1. I wait 30 seconds. I finally end up in the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Documentation application, which by the way looks similar to the thing launched from SQL Server 2005 Management Studio (and THAT THERE is a constipated beast of a tool, my comments coming soon...). The index tool window is unfiltered, and the contents text box is not synchronized with the topic I'm viewing. Neither is the contents window.
I click Search from the command bar, enter something interesting and click the Search button. It looks all over various Microsoft sanctioned web sites (MSDN, Codezone and some forums). I click Cancel after it has found some things and a big red X with "Search failed" is displayed.
Anyway... if the thing were just fast and lean, that would be great. I can use Google to search everything else much faster. Microsoft, you have made this help tool bloated and slow, it's not really helpful.
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