Signing MS Help Viewer Content

The following steps can be used to sign the MS Help Viewer content so that it can be installed silently.

  Note

Please note that this information was supplied by an end user and diagnosing any problems that you may encounter is outside the scope of the Sandcastle Help File Builder project. If you have issues, the best course of action is to post a message asking for help with signing content on the Visual Studio General Questions forum.

In all of the following examples, substitute your file name for the "Documentation" filename.

  1. Create the help files using Sandcastle Help File Builder.

  2. Create the cabinet file using the following command:

     
    makecab Documentation.mshc Documentation.cab

  3. Sign the cabinet file:

     
    signtool sign /q /sha1 [Your signing certificate thumbprint] Documentation.cab

  4. Modify the file reference in the MSHA file to point to the new cabinet file:

     
    <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>My Class Library Documentation</title>
  </head>
  <body class="vendor-book">
    <div class="details">
      <span class="vendor">Your Company Name</span>
      <span class="locale">en-us</span>
      <span class="product">My Class Library</span>
      <span class="name">My Class Library Documentation</span>
    </div>
    <div class="package-list">
      <div class="package">
        <!-- NOTE: The "name" span value cannot contain any periods! -->
        <span class="name">Documentation</span>
        <a class="current-link" href="Documentation.cab">Documentation.cab</a>
      </div>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

  5. You can now install silently using a command line similar to the following:

     
    REM Help Viewer 1.0
HelpLibraryManagerLauncher.exe /product "VS" /version "100" /locale en-us /silent
    /sourceMedia "C:\FullPathToFile\Documentation.msha"

REM Help Viewer 2.0
HelpLibraryManagerLauncher.exe /viewerVersion 2.0 /locale en-us /wait 0
    /operation install /silent /sourceUri "C:\FullPathToFile\Documentation.msha"

See Also