Editor for end user documentation in C# WinForm app

Question

I'm developing a WinForm app in c# 4.0 and would like other (non-developer) colleagues to contribute writing a context sensitive end-user helpfile. First I thought I could use "HTML Help Workshop" from Microsoft, but it seems outdated (Vista and Windows 7 not supported). Then I've looked at Sandcastle, but the documentation is lacking and I wonder if it is suitable for non-technical users to write end-user documentation. So I read about RoboHelp, but it's way to expensive for me. I'm getting lost in all the information that is available about helpfiles. Can someone help give some best practices or information on what tools to use and what output format I should target (still chm or other).

Answer 1

Great question. I like your idea of non-developers contributing to the end-user documentation.

This idea might motivate users and testers of your application to easily contribute to the documentation.

The first thing that comes to my mind, is using a some sort of wiki engine. You could build a simple function in your WinForm application, that fires up a browser and directs in to the wiki. You could use the context from which it is called to build up an url; e.g. http://dev-wiki.mycompany.com/LoginForm?action=edit. Here the name of the form ("LoginForm") is used in the url of a wiki page.

Alternatively, you could simply use the embedded web browser control for WinForms to access the wiki. That would look something like:

var url = GetWikiUrl(myForm);
browserControl.Navigate(url);

This would be very easy to embed in your application.

In a controlled (office) environment, this would be very easy to set up. In you production environment it might be a bit more difficult, but still doable. It might leverage some end-user contributions too.

Answer 2

For writing documentation, I use sphinx. It lets you document in plain text and has various output formats (chm, html, pdf etc.).

Some of these (chm, html) can be used as context-sensitive help sources.

However simple, the sphinx user-interface (text editor and make file) might not be suitable for non-technical users.