How's this for a boneheaded move? After posting Help Builder on Friday and hyping the new VS.Net features it turns out that my installer screwed up and didn't pull in the actual VS.NET add in files. Since I'm currently out of town working I don't have a second full test machine that I usually use to run through new distributions and so I shortcut that process this time around and didn't notice the missing files.

I apologize for anybody who downloaded and got nothing but grief trying to get the VS.Net stuff going. I've updated the code again though this morning and now the stuff's in there. I promise! <g>

In the meantime I've also added support for VB.NET (thanks for Yag for giving me a kick in the ass) so you can now insert XML Comments into VB.NET and update class members from VB.NET code and these same XML comments. Of course, XML Comments aren't supported natively in VB.NET 2003, but they will be in Whidbey (as well as through some add-ins available now for VS.NET 2003) and Help Builder uses the same syntax.

The VB.NET integration stuff was a pain, mainly because the VB editor works a bit differently than the C# editor and getting stuff dumped into it required some code branching. Not too bad, but figuring out exactly what was subtly different took a while to figure out.

By the way, I'm making all the source code for the VS.NET Add-In and HelpBuilderHelpProvider available. The source is not quite current at the moment with these latest changes, but I'll update it on a regular basis. I figure by providing the source code we're providing a real example of how to use the Help Builder Automation model in .NET. 

Enough said. I hope this SNAFU didn't piss off too many people. If you downloaded previously you will need to uninstall the previous install and redownload and re-install the downloaded version. Then go into the Options Dialog to Administration and enable the VS.NET Add-in.

For more info see the Microsoft .NET Features page  in the Help Builder documentation which provides further links to what's available and how it all works.