[Mono-list] Need help: writing a COM control.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello guys,

    I usually find myself traveling and without the desire to boot
VMware.  The only reason to start up VMWare is to read the online
documentation for the .NET Framework.

    Ideally, we would have our own documentation, but we do not have it
yet.  So what I want to do is pull all the data from the existing
Microsoft implementation, and dump it into HTML that I can later view
from Linux when am traveling.

    I found that they have a control that handles the `ms-help:' prefix
(indeed, the URL would work just fine under IE).  But the API is an
internal API, so it is not easy to figure out what arguments to pass to
it.  Even with this, I was able to write a simple C# program that could
load the index, and return a list of topics, but I was stopped there.

    Since the `ms-help:' happens to be some kind of handler that IE
uses, I wonder if it is possible to write a COM control that would allow
me to pull the stream of data that would be rendered by the ms-help:
control.

     Once this is done, I could safely write a little program to pull
all the data and copy it over to Linux to browse.  I know its possible,
I just do not know enough COM to pull this out.

Miguel.