What good tools are available to create online help for .net applications?

Question

I have a winforms application that presently ships with a chm file for context-sensitive help documentation (not API docs), created using MS HTML Help Workshop.

I'd like to move to online documentation (don't have to ship it with the product, can update it easily, etc). What tools are recommended for this sort of thing, and what are their pros and cons?

I'd like to be able to do the following:

• host the help files on my webserver
• provide context-sensitive help
• have reasonable-looking navigation/TOC for the help
• host different versions of the help for different major versions of the application
• easily edit the help. Something like a wiki would be nice, preferably with good wysiwyg editor.
• easily create a PDF manual from the help files
• not have to pay (much) for the tool

I guess I can do most of this with HTML Help Workshop and a bit of work, but if there's better tools out there I'd like to know.

Answer 1

Most commercial help systems have an option to generate the help as a set of HTML pages that could then be uploaded to a website. Certinaly HelpStudio does which I use myself. You could also try out Doc-2-Help which is also a major player in the help market as well.