Using Dynamic Help
You've just seen the Start Page and all great things it offers you. The next best thing about the Visual Studio .NET IDE is a new feature to Microsoft products called Dynamic Help. Dynamic Help literally gives you the help file information about whatever item in the IDE has the current focus. When Visual Studio .NET starts, the focus is the Start Page. To start Dynamic Help, press the Ctrl+F1 keys. The Help contents window appears on the screen, and the current help file for the Start Page shows up, as Figure 2.7 demonstrates.
Figure 2.7. Dynamic Help for the Start Page.
From this point, you can click the available hyperlinks in the Dynamic Help window to learn more about the IDE and customizing your environment. The Dynamic Help window also has three buttons on its toolbar: Contents, Index, and Search. If you click the Contents button, the window changes to the contents of the software development kit (SDK) help file. If you click the Search button, you have the ability to search for items. Clicking the Index button gives you the searchable index of the help file. Figure 2.8 demonstrates the Search capability. Notice how the Results window appears at the bottom of the screen. From this point, you can click on items in the results, and the help screen changes to that particular topic. You can also change the default filter of the help search. My default was Visual Basic and Related, but you can simply change the Filtered By drop-down list and select another language.
Figure 2.8. Using Search in Dynamic Help.
The predefined filters for Dynamic Help can be modified by selecting Help, Edit Filters from the Help main menu. You won't normally need to modify the filters or add new filters, but the capability is there to do so.
From the Help screen, you can get back to the Start Page by selecting Show Start Page from the Help menu or by clicking the Home button on the main toolbar.