Microsoft InfoViewer program

 

Microsoft InfoViewer Program

Microsoft InfoViewer was a documentation viewer and help system used by Microsoft in the mid-to-late 1990s, especially around the Visual Studio 97 and Visual C++ 5.0 era. It was designed to browse large developer documentation sets such as the MSDN Library, Visual C++ reference manuals, Platform SDK materials, and bundled sample code collections.

InfoViewer can be understood as an intermediate help technology between earlier Windows Help systems and later HTML Help. Before InfoViewer, Microsoft commonly used WinHelp files, usually with the .hlp extension, and multimedia-oriented documentation systems such as Microsoft Multimedia Viewer. After InfoViewer, Microsoft moved toward HTML Help, whose compiled help files used the .chm extension.

The InfoViewer system used proprietary container files, most notably .ivt, often interpreted as InfoViewer Title files. These files could contain HTML-like documents, images, stylesheets, sample source code, project files, executables, and other resources. In the Visual C++ 5.0 documentation set, for example, a file such as VCSAMPLE.IVT functioned as a large archive of Visual C++ sample materials rather than as a simple text help file.

InfoViewer documents were addressed internally through special moniker-style URLs such as:

mk:@ivt:...

This indicates that InfoViewer treated .ivt files as browsable information containers. A topic inside an InfoViewer title could be referenced by an internal path, much like a web page inside a local archive.

In practical terms, Microsoft InfoViewer was part of the CD-ROM documentation culture of the 1990s. At that time, developer documentation was too large and interconnected to be comfortably handled as separate plain files or traditional help pages. InfoViewer allowed Microsoft to distribute a large, searchable, hyperlink-based documentation library on CD-ROM and integrate it into the DevStudio environment.

The format, however, was proprietary and short-lived. It was mainly tied to Microsoft’s own development tools and MSDN distribution system. As HTML became the standard language for documentation, Microsoft replaced InfoViewer with HTML Help and compiled .chm files. HTML Help was more general-purpose, more closely aligned with web technologies, and became the standard Windows help format for many years.

Historically, Microsoft InfoViewer is significant because it represents a transitional stage in Microsoft documentation technology: from WinHelp-style application help, through CD-ROM-based hypertext documentation, toward HTML-based and eventually web-based developer documentation.

In short, Microsoft InfoViewer was a local hypertext documentation viewer for large Microsoft developer libraries, using .ivt and related files as proprietary containers. It was especially associated with Visual Studio 97, Visual C++ 5.0, and MSDN Library distributions, before being superseded by HTML Help and .chm files.