How to Add Microsoft's Searchable Online Help to your VB.net Application

Who doesn't like having access to help within their applications. Here is a fast and easy way you can add Microsoft's searchable help directly to your application.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• VB.net
• Internet Connection

1. Open VB.net and create a new project. Make sure you select VB.net and Windows Application when the new project window appears if you are going through Visual Studio.

2. 
    
   Controls

   Add a Textbox, button and a web browser control to your form.

3. Change the text property of your button to the word "Search". This is done primarily for visual purposes and has no affect on the underlying code.

4. Double click on the button to bring up the button's click event code window. In this code window we are going to type in the necessary functionality to make this program work.

5. 
    
   Code

   In the code window we need to type in a few things to make this work. I have attached a picture so you can see each line code.
   First we define a local string variable called strURL. In this variable we will set the Microsoft URL to their search feature.
   
   Next we build the URL string, by adding in the search value entered by the user into our textbox. Since we are submitting this information over the internet we replace all spaces with "+" signs so the microsoft method parser on the other end can accept the entire string that we send.
   
   Finally we display the search results in our application's web browser by navigating to the URL we built.
   
   Take a look at the code in the picture. eHow does not allow posting of code in the how to articles directly.

6. Run the program by pressing the F5 key on your keyboard.

7. Type in something into the search textbox and click the Search button.

8. 
    
   Final Results

   Notice how the search string that you entered now appears in the search box on the microsoft site along with results. In my case I searched on "Microsoft Access". It returned over 200 pages of results.

Resources

• Mike's "How-to" Blog

[MI-Sandi]

on 11/24/2008 This is greek to me, but looks like it will definatey help someone out there, I will issue 5* on their behalf!