Are you a Microsoft MVP and would like to check out Help Builder? If you are, you can get a free, full copy of Help Builder from us. No strings attached, no signup – just come and get it. To do so:

Send me an email with a link to your Microsoft MVP profile so I can verify you and a return email address so I can send you the download detail.

send to rstrahl @ west-wind.com (no spaces). Note that if your email is very different than your profile or name I might have to get back to you.

Why am I doing this? Few of reasons.

First a number of MVP’s have actually helped me out a lot along the way of getting Help Builder finished last year. And over the years, well, MVPs (and others too have) helped me out in too many ways to even mention. So this one way to give something back.

But ultimately I’m looking for feedback, and MVPs are good about that, and not too political about it either (which is a good thing even if it hurts)  Comments, suggestions, hate mail <g>… it’s been very hard to get feedback either good or bad and I would like to improve the product and in order to do so I need more people that are vocal and check it out.

As a quick summary, Help Builder is a Documentation solution for both end user documentation and developer documentation. It’s not NDoc, although it provides a good chunk of the functionality that NDoc provides for .NET developer documentation from .NET assemblies. But Help Builder is a full doc solution so it doesn’t just generate docs from assemblies (and COM objects and Fox classes and SQL Server Databases) but lets you create samples, walk through overview topics – you know the stuff a real help file needs to have for a complete solution. It also includes VS.NET and VFP IDE integration to let you hook up help content to WinForms or read/write XML comments from source code to Help Builder and vice versa.

I’m hoping that this will get more people to try out the product and hopefully motivate a few more people in the world to write documentation – god knows, we need it with all this undocumented developer stuff out in the wild these days.

So if you’re an MVP and interested, drop me a line.