What tools are available to create a help file in Visual Studio 2010?

it is an awkward target for tool vendors. In most shops, the help is authored by professional writers that don't have any use for Visual Studio in their day-to-day activities. Third party authoring tools like RoboHelp is their preferred weapon of choice.

The VS2005 SDK tool you probably saw was HelpStudio Lite, a product of Innovasys. There is no version available that integrates with VS2010 and judging from a forum post they have no intention of releasing one. Their Document X! product however does, sounds like what you ought to take a look at. The eval version is available for download from here.

I remember that a year or so ago some people on Joel's The Business of Software forum were recommending HelpNDoc.

Forum discussion: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.359131.10

Here are your options...

If you want Microsoft's documentation generator with VS integration:

• Sandcastle Help File Builder for help file generation
• DocProject to integrate it into VS

Although, it appears that DocProject doesn't quite support VS2010 yet.

For the Non-MS solution there's GhostDoc, which does support VS 2010 integration and appears to be a better solution.

For options that don't integrate into Visual Studio:

• DoxyGen
• Docu
• NDoc3