Microsoft Help Viewer MSHC and DocMounter

DocMounter generates help solutions in the MSHC help format developed for Microsoft Help Viewer in Visual Studio. This format is also known as MSHelp3:

MSHC help file in Microsoft Help Viewer

Microsoft introduced this new help format with the release of Visual Studio 2010. The final official name of this technology was "Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0". You could also hear such names as "MSHelp3" and "MSHC", which mean the same. "MSHelp3" was being used as a work name for the new format and it has been abandoned, "MSHC" is now widely used instead. "MSHC" stands for "Microsoft Help Container" and it is also the filename extension for help packages in this new help format. Actually an MSHC file is a zip archive with a special extension that contains HTML topics with Microsoft meta tags (TOC structure, keywords, etc.)

The main problem with the MSHC format was the availability of viewers for it. Microsoft Help Viewer was actually the only utility capable to open and render MSHC helps. But this viewer could be installed only as a part of Microsoft Visual Studio installation, which was not acceptable in many real-world scenarios. 10Tec solved this problem in 2021 by providing its own alternative viewer for MSHC files - 10Tec Help Viewer. This is a lightweight portable tool that provides functionality similar to Microsoft Help Viewer and that can be easily redistributed with your apps without the need to install Microsoft Visual Studio. 10Tec Help Viewer is also used as a part of the DocMounter redistribution package to display MSHC help files built with this .NET documentation tool.

DocMounter system requirements »