Hi all,
I've recently switched to a new documentation engine for generating the Web Connection documentation and the new help file is now live.
The new engine uses cleaner URLs (slug and path naming rather than topic ids) and is more flexible in its design and layout while maintaining most of the features that the Help Builder based engine provides. All topic content was imported from Help Builder so the transition should be pretty smooth.
But if you should run into issues in the documentation, I would appreciate it if you could click on the Comment or Report Problem link.
The Web Connection help file is the biggest help file I work with (4500 topics but a good chunk deprecated) so I haven't been able to check every possible topic.
For those curious: Documentation Monster is new tool I'm working on, which is based on the Markdown Monster Editor and that provides all the rich editing features of that editor in addition to the feature of Help Builder.
At some point this is going to be a released product, but for the moment it's internal with a public preview. Hopefully later this summer it'll be available as a standalone product.
Offline Reader Application Available
As part of the modernization of documentation tooling I'm working on with Documentation Monster, I can now generate a self contained documentation viewer that runs the HTML documentation completely offline - sort of like the old CHM file, but without all the IE browser limitations.
So now we have an offline Web Connection Documentation Viewer:
You can find the offline viewer here:
It's a self-contained EXE that unpacks the Html documentation into a folder and runs it locally.
Check it out and let me know how it works.
Aloha,
+++ Rick ---
re: New Web Connection Documentation Online Richard Kaye
Rick Strahl
Apr 7, 2025 @ 06:40am
Proofreading challenge accepted! 😃
Interesting, Rick. Will this replace your HTML Help Builder completely, or connect to it in some way? What will the search engine be?
Yes Help Builder has outlived its lifetime... it was getting incredibly long in the tooth, and the fact that the Web Browser control has become a major problem makes it not worth continuing on with that path. And frankly I don't want to maintain that old FoxPro codebase any longer 😄
I've been working on a new tool called Documentation Monster, which had a few false starts over the years, but I'm finally taking the time to build this out.
I'm using it now internally for all my documentation and I've moved about half of all my online documentation to using it. Here are a few examples:
Application Documentation:
Reference Docs:
The output doesn't look very different from Help Builder - it's based on the same templates but it's all .NET under the hood including the rendering engine.
The output doesn't look very different from the HelpBuilder generated docs (on purpose, because for a base generic template it works well) but the application looks very different:
It's based on Markdown Monster so it has most of MM's rich editing features. Modern UI, much smoother operation and a much more usable UI. If you've used Markdown Monster you know what it feels like.
As to Help Builder - there's an import that allows you to import a Help Builder project (from an HB Export from recent versions). So it's a one way export/import.
DM uses a JSON project file and Markdown documents as its 'data source' so it can be easily stored and topic content can be updated directly in the Markdown files, but ultimately you still need to build and publish into a Web site. Publishing via FTP is built in and output is generated into a self-contained folder that is a static Web site that can be copied straight to any Web host (or GitHub Pages).
Right now it's pretty rough still but it works. DM is basically built ontop of Markdown Monster so there's still a lot of MM related stuff cropping up in the menus and UI.
If you want to play around with it you can do that now - just make sure you back up frequently (DM automatically backs up on shutdown and keeps a number of recent backups).
+++ Rick ---
