Innovasys Ltd., a leader in help authoring and documentation tools,
today announced the inclusion of a tailored version of the Innovasys
HelpStudio help authoring product, HelpStudio Lite, in the Microsoft
Visual Studio 2005 Software Development Kit. By providing a full help
authoring environment within the Visual Studio 2005 SDK, Innovasys is
providing developers building components and products that integrate
with Visual Studio 2005 a complete solution for authoring help
materials to accompany their solutions. HelpStudio Lite enables
developers to author and maintain high quality help content with a
consistent style quickly and easily.
"We're pleased to continue our relationship with Innovasys and support
HelpStudio Lite in the Visual Studio 2005 SDK," said Nick Abbott, group
manager in the .NET Developer Product Management Group at Microsoft
Corp. "Developers building tools and components that integrate with
Visual Studio 2005 will benefit from Innovasys' solution, because it
enables them to seamlessly author help materials for their solutions
and create a consistent look and feel for the end customer."
HelpStudio Lite includes a template based authoring concept that makes
it easy for developers to customize and change over time the look and
feel of a help system without requiring rework to existing content.
HelpStudio Lite ships with two default templates; one that reflects the
look and feel of Visual Studio .NET 2003 technical documentation and
another implementing the new style introduced with Visual Studio 2005
technical documentation.
"Enabling developers to concentrate on content authoring is a core part
of the HelpStudio design. The template based authoring concept,
together with the many other productivity features of HelpStudio Lite
enable developers to get great looking results, consistent with the
established Microsoft documentation styles, right out of the box." said
Richard Sloggett, CTO of Innovasys.
Developers can easily upgrade to the full version of HelpStudio in
order to enjoy a range of enhanced functionality including pure HTML
and HTML Help 1.x output, PDF booklet creation, conditional content,
customizable 'content helpers' library, source code control
integration, imaging and screen capture tools and a full automation and
extensibility application programming interface (API). HelpStudio Lite
users may also decide to upgrade to the full HelpStudio version if they
wish to produce help content that is not integrated with Visual Studio
2005.
Document! X Integration
Both HelpStudio Lite and the full version of HelpStudio integrate with
Innovasys Document! X. Document! X automates the production of
technical documentation for Microsoft .NET Framework-based and
COM-based components, type libraries, Microsoft SQL Server and
Microsoft Access databases and XSD schemas. Document! X features a
Visual Comment Editor integrated into Visual Studio 2005 that enables
developers to edit their XML format source code comments within a
WYSIWYG preview of the generated page. Also included is a stand-alone
authoring environment for creating content external to source code
comments.
Document! X integration with HelpStudio and HelpStudio Lite enables
developers to create complete help systems, including a full API
reference for .NET Framework-based components generated automatically
by Document! X as well as manually authored tutorials and supporting
material created in HelpStudio or HelpStudio Lite.
"Document! X and HelpStudio form a powerful toolset for creating
technical materials for .NET Framework-based components. The
integration in the HelpStudio authoring environment makes it easy to
link to automatically generated reference topics from HelpStudio
topics, and the seamless build process allows developers to build a
single consolidated help system directly from HelpStudio that contains
both the automatically generated reference topics and the content
manually authored in HelpStudio." said Richard Sloggett.
Availability
Microsoft is distributing HelpStudio Lite with the Visual Studio 2005
SDK. HelpStudio Lite is included free and automatically installed along
with the SDK. The full version of HelpStudio has pricing starting at
$425.
About Innovasys
Founded in 1997, Innovasys is a leading provider of technical
documentation and help authoring tools. The combination of Document! X,
for automated technical documentation of Microsoft .NET components, COM
components, databases and XSD schemas, and HelpStudio, for help
authoring, optionally integrated with Document! X is used by companies
worldwide including Infragistics, Dundas, Telerik, Data Dynamics and
Janus Systems.
Further information can be found at http://www.innovasys.com
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