I updated Help Builder earlier today with a new version that fixes and updates a number of essential features. I've been real lucky to have people report bugs to me (well it's more or less automated) and I'm always blown away when there's an obvious failure that was complete skipped by my own use case testing.

Specifically this release fixes a bug with SQL 2005 Database imports. Several people reported problems on this and I kinda brushed off the earlier reports. The SQL Import routines had been working without any issues for quite some time. But as it turns out the last checks I made occurred before the final release of SQL Server 2005 – apparently there were some last minute structure changes and these changes actually jinxed the Help Builder SQL Import. An easy fix, but sometimes the whole concept of "Listen what you're customers are saying" can simply not be overemphasized.

In a similar scenario, a number of folks have been bugging me for some time to create a better selection mechanism to select classes to import out of a .NET assembly. The original dialog that was used to perform this task allows the user to select an assembly and optional Xml documentation file, then shows a drop down list of classes.

There have been many requests to provide a more visual display as it's kind a hard to pick a class out of a huge library. I've mildly acknowledged the need but didn't really put it on high priority. Yesterday I finally took some time to do it though and now the UI is a lot more usable in a couple of ways:

It allows find a specific class more easily by looking for the namespace and class plus the visual clues separating class types, interfaces etc. as well as allowing selection of multiple classes.

Now this is a 'little' interface enhancement, but since yesterday I've been using the heck out of this feature myself. I'm in the middle of documentation a large component library for a project and this feature is a huge timesaver.

I'm kicking myself now for not having done this much sooner. Again, my customers were asking for this probably 2 years ago. The customer is always right, isn't she?