Express help for busy developers
If you haven’t been to our website in a while (or been following us on Twitter), you may have missed a very important resource that we published this year: our new Add-in Express Learning Center. Think of these pages as your entry point to Add-in Express development – a one-stop-shop to help you quickly locate technical articles, HowTos, learning videos, sample projects and blog posts for any of our products. Take a look around – I guarantee you’ll find that missing information you’ve always been looking for (and maybe didn’t know you need!), or get insights into some key features our products offer that may give you new ideas to implement into your solutions.
Another important change regarding our help resources was recently included in the March 24 update for Add-in Express 2010 for Office and .NET (version 6.4.3056). What’s that you say? You missed the update? No problem! Just go to our Latest News page and subscribe to our RSS feed so you never miss an important update again. Anyway, what this update added was a new Help Panel to the designer view of the AddinModule class:
The last two links point to our Learning Center and web forums. However, the first two are handy links to local help content for Getting Started and Deployment, which will conveniently open in your browser:
If you have been using a version older than 6.3.3052, you may be surprised by this new help system. We’ve migrated from the compiled help file format (.chm) to the better Microsoft Help System that you may be familiar with from other applications that access local help content or from MSDN Online.
However, there are still many developers who like the Microsoft Help 2.0 system (Document Explorer). No problem!! You can still access our new help content using a freeware viewer that’s built to mimic that older system. Just download the H2Viewer and give it a try. You’ll see it’s quite similar to our new system:
You can even use it to view other local content! When it starts, just choose another namespace like the Outlook 2010 Developer Reference:
Whichever method you choose to learn about our products and class references is certainly a matter of preference and taste for you! But if you ever have a problem finding what you are looking for, never hesitate to contact us. Happy coding!