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straightwaytek
Ketchup Master
Canada
66 Posts |
 Posted - Aug 16 2005 : 05:17:48 AM
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Hello,
What I mean by when I say this is that say upon install of Visual Assist X, it should ask or check for a copy of MSDN Library (say even the MSDN stuff that comes with your copy of Visual Studio or Visual C++ or whatever), then if it is found, every time a windows api call is made and you hover your cursor over the function, or variable call it expains what it does from the MSDN documentation.
Sincerely,
James Simpson |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
19014 Posts |
Posted - Aug 16 2005 : 4:41:30 PM
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| an interesting thought. what do other people think? i can see possible problems with how this overlaps with the current tooltips, and also how to select what to show from a massive page of MSDN documentation on a function. on the occasions i have looked up functions i often get pages of text, including optional examples. rather to much information to show in a tooltip. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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straightwaytek
Ketchup Master
Canada
66 Posts |
Posted - Aug 16 2005 : 5:44:14 PM
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Hello again,
What I was thinking was that maybe the tooltip that has the documentation would be stripped down, Visual Assist X would parse the MSDN file for that function and only show the useful parts (user definable ofcourse), so maybe show what the function does, (description) and maybe an example. In the MSDN library included in Visual Studio .NET 2003 (including Visual C++ .NET 2003), the MSDN documentation is separated, by each topic into one file in a Microsoft Compiled Help File. Maybe when the user firsts starts-up Visual Assist X it would parse each help file looking for the "keywords", so that when I enter a function in it would know what file it is linked to (each file is like 100 Kb at most). As far as appearance there are really two options for this. First you could use the control/componet that is used as the graphic tooltip for the options dialog for Visual Assist X as the tooltip (ofcourse importing that section of the help in as the content). The second option was, as I've mentioned before knowing where the information for a particular subject is, in the numerous files and then when you hover over a function for say more than 5 seconds (again this could be user-definable), it would pull up the help topic show it as text in a tooltip (again looking through the textual part of the help stripping say the Description and Examples off). It sure beats having to load up the huge MSDN library or go online to figure out a answer to what exactly a function does.
Sincerely,
James Simpson |
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feline
Whole Tomato Software
United Kingdom
19014 Posts |
Posted - Aug 17 2005 : 3:26:26 PM
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personally i don't really have any dealings with the MSDN library, but i do see the appeal of this idea.
i basically have two reservations:
a) this could well be outside the scope of VAX. the developers are not exactly short of work at the moment 
b) the complexity in doing this correctly, and the amount of work, and handling of special cases that could come with this.
i will ask support and see what they think of this. |
zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness |
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WannabeeDeveloper
Tomato Guru
Germany
775 Posts |
Posted - Aug 17 2005 : 6:10:48 PM
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The Problem *I* see there is already visible in VS .NET 2002/2003 with the dynamic help window.
When I type GetComputerName in order to get the simple WinAPI function, I get the following links in the Dynamic Window:
GetComputerName Method (C++)
ILogScripting::GetComputerName (IIS)
InetLogInformation::GetComputerName (IIS)
All three of them are simply wrong!
None of them point me to the documentation I'd need...
So, I not even Microsofts own tool is able to filter out the Info I need, how should Visual Assist X do this correctly? |
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straightwaytek
Ketchup Master
Canada
66 Posts |
Posted - Aug 20 2005 : 12:46:21 PM
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Hello,
I am suggesting that we do this on whatever language we are using.
For instance, if we got a MFC based project, only C++,MFC and Windows SDK related stuff will show up. Now I know that it won't be give you all the right answer all the time because MSDN may not have the answer to your problem, however most of the time (I would say 80 to 90% of the time) it does give you the answer or at least steer you the right way. I believe all of this information can be retrieved from either the vcproj, project settings for a particular project, but I know it is possible to determine what language we are dealing with. |
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