What is it with Microsoft’s help system? I’m in the middle of debugging some important code in Visual Studio, completely focused on the task at hand. I reach for F5, mistakenly hit F1 or F2, and my hard drive starts churning… for like 3 minutes! “This is a huge crash” I thought. Lo and behold, after a few minutes of 100% processor usage and gigs of disk access, MS help comes up.

What on earth? Why would anyone use this system if it takes so long to come up? Give me a way to query help quickly from a search box — don’t bother about indexing it for me on the spot. If you’ve got to index it for searching, do it in the background… don’t make hitting the F1 key an odious experience that completely disrupts your entire work flow. I think MS Office has pretty good (and performant) help integration… it pops up on the side, doesn’t occlude what I’m doing with a separate window, and does a pretty good job of giving me some contextual help as I work. It’s time for the rest of the MS products to step up.

With the existing situation, I avoid F1 like the plague. I wish I could rip it off my keyboard… wretched, vile key.