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New Help Viewer Power Tool Beta

posted May 4, 2010, 7:00 PM by Robert Chandler   [ updated May 5, 2010, 5:25 PM ]
MS Help Team have just released a new Help Viewer.
It can be run embedded in a browser or run standalone.
It has the full index but still the lo-band TOC experience.

My Experience

I had to reboot the PC (as well as restart Agent) to make it work. I'm currently having problems with all browsers except Chrome. I hope you have a better experience. For me this is a very ruff first release which I'll uninstall for now and wait until they fix it up. Thankfully when I uninstall (no reboot required), the old experience is fully reinstated.
  • IE8 - Banding (stylesheet) no longer works. Embedded viewer does not show.
  • FireFox, Opera, Safari - Embedded viewer shows but the right content side is blank.
  • H3Viewer - I've lost all branding. 
  • When I switch to Standalone mode it still shows in my browsers.


Here are some screen shots.

Embedded Mode

In embedded mode a left hand navigation panel (done in Silverlight) appears for http:///127.0.0.1:47873/ type URLs.

The TOC is lo-band style. 


Search tab

Index - Disambiguator items show inline.

Standalone Mode

As you can see I'm not seeing any branding in the content pane.




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