Create Help and Manual for MVC Application - asp.net-mvc

Question

I have a small application that needs to have a professional looking Help/Manual section. The help would consist of:
HowTos
FAQ
References
I am wondering if there is a free (Easy to learn) tool that can help me produce these documents in HTML format? Any suggestions?
Thanks for the help

Answer 1

for a new MVC application we are designing right now we plan to use an external help site in a wiki form. There are wiki engines like mediawiki and others, the idea is to have context sensitive help ( different help page opened from different application pages ) and also to allow users to add content like formulas and examples afterwards.
The cool thing is that a wiki track changes and does the versioning for us and for free so help can grow being fully decoupled from our application source code and users can see who has added what if they want.
in our case, it's only an Intranet application so in fact we have no security issues in the internal network.

Answer 2

You have to create more or lesss that has MSDN for instance.
It has two columns
The firsrt column has list of descriptions
The second column is text + images + video + links.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/aspnet/core/tutorials/razor-pages/razor-pages-start?view=aspnetcore-3.1&tabs=visual-studio
Simplest approach is to use static files and resources. Try it.
In ASP .Net MVC you can create special _LayoutFAQ.cshtml and apply it to IFRAME pages.
The Index FAQ page could look like following
#{
ViewBag.Title = "FAQ";
Layout = "~/Views/Shared/_LayoutMain.cshtml";
}
<div class="container-fluid">
<h5 class="mt-1 text-center text-success mb-0">My mega FAQ</h5>
<hr class="mt-1" />
<div class="row">
<div class="col-sm-3 overflow-auto pl-0">
<ul class="">
<li><a onclick="NavigateIframe('#Url.Content("~/FAQ/Page1")');" href="#">Page 1</a></li>
<li><a onclick="NavigateIframe('#Url.Content("~/FAQ/Page2")');" href="#">Page 2</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="col-sm-9 border-left">
<div class="embed-responsive embed-responsive-16by9">
<iframe style="height:80vh!important;" id="pageContainer" class="embed-responsive-item" src=""></iframe>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<nav class="navbar fixed-bottom navbar-expand-lg navbar-light bg-light border-top border-secondary">
<button class="navbar-toggler navbar-toggler-right" type="button" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#navbarSupportedContent" aria-controls="navbarSupportedContent" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Toggle navigation">
<span class="navbar-toggler-icon"></span>
</button>
<div class="collapse navbar-collapse" id="navbarSupportedContent">
<ul class="navbar-nav mr-auto">
<li class="nav-item active">
<i class="fa fa-angle-left"></i> Back
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</nav>
#section Scripts {
#Scripts.Render("~/bundles/jqueryval")
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function () {
});
function NavigateIframe(url) {
event.preventDefault();
$("#pageContainer").prop("src", url);
return false;
}
</script>
}
#section head{
<style type="text/css">
</style>
}
But if your FAQ changes often you probably have to replicate backend and frontend like this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-US/aspnet/core/tutorials/razor-pages/razor-pages-start?view=aspnetcore-3.1&tabs=visual-studio