Question

I am trying to open windows 7 help from a .Net form application to a specific bookmark, at printer installation for example.

I tried to open it in the same whay that I open Control Panel applets (Back & Restore in the example below).

ProcessStartInfo startInfo = new ProcessStartInfo(@"c:\windows\system32\control.exe", "/name Microsoft.BackupAndRestore");

startInfo.UseShellExecute = true;

Process.Start(startInfo);

But it doesn’t work.
I didn’t succeed neither to open the .exe.
Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

IIRC HelpPane.exe works with .h1s files so if you have full path to such a file you can just use for example Process.Start (@"C:\myDir\myhelpfile.h1s"); to open it.

According to MS another option (most likely the recommenced one) is to host the HelpPane (which is basically a COM object!) – for details see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms728715%28v=VS.85%29.aspx

Other important MSDN links are:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb757030.aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms728718%28v=VS.85%29.aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms728713%28v=VS.85%29.aspx

From the above links:

The Help Pane API can only be used to display the Windows Help content
set. It can be customized by OEMs, system builders, and enterprise
customers under license agreement, but cannot be used by third-party
programs. Displaying content that is not part of the Windows Help
content set is not supported.

Depending on what you want to achieve you might need to first sign a license agreement with MS…

EDIT – as per comments:

To display a specific topic you need to call the method DisplayTask of the COM object with the URL of that topic.

EDIT 2 – as per comments the final solution:

Add a reference to C:\Windows\System32\HelpPaneProxy.dll to the project then you can use the HelpPane like this

HxHelpPane pHelpPane = new HxHelpPane(); 
pHelpPane.DisplayTask("mshelp://windows/?id=e725b43f-94e4-4410-98e7-cc87ab2739aa");