Help!

Help!

Vision/Scope

Constraints

1. The Help! project will be written in C# using Visual Studio (preferably 2008 for release and 2005 for the Prototype).

Baseline Functional Specification

1. The system must be easy-to-use, lightweight and portable.
2. Stand-alone, compressed binary format that contains:
1. all HTML topics and resources.
2. XML-based TOC and index data.
3. full-text search data.
4. optionally, web service information for downloading live HTML content from various end-points.
5. mixed content; e.g., the default topic's content comes from a web service and the remaining content exists in the file itself. (Think VS Start page).
3. Develop a public UserControl for presentation:
1. Point it to a binary resource file on disc or on a website.
2. TOC, index and full-text search tabs.
3. Content area for viewing topics.
4. Easily customizable, with the ability to add new tabs for additional HTML content.
4. Develop a stand-alone WinForms application that integrates the UserControl with the binary data file as an embedded resource.
1. Support X-copy deployment. There should be no prerequesites on an end-user's system other than the .NET Framework.
5. Visual Studio project template for building a customized instance of the WinForms application for deployment.
6. Console and GUI for building the binary resource file, stand-alone.
7. Expose a public API with the following functions:
1. Request raw HTML topics by title and collections of topics by keywords.
2. Add/remove/replace HTML topics that are persisted in the binary resource file.
3. Invoke a context-sensitive help dialog, tool window or tooltip for a specific topic, keyword or full-text query.
8. Develop an "extender" component that adds properties to controls for context-sensitive help information and displays a tooltip using the API.
9. Full support for Unicode data.
10. CAS security and optional encryption.

Architecture

Actors

Usage Scenarios