Want your AND help search back?
As I've been compiling the long list of customer feedback - complaints, suggestions and otherwise - one of the common themes was - "Search stinks! The results are not pared down by what I use to search!"
Well, it certainly was the intention of the help team to provide a great search algorithm, but the problem for some is that it does not work as expected. If you type in several keywords, some people expect to have those AND-ed together, so, for example, if I searched with keywords custom and wizard, I would expect to get results that include both custom and wizard. But in Visual Studio and MSDN, the offline/local help search tries to be more helpful than that, since in the world of development we don't always know the exact name of a class or attribute that we need, and we might need help finding them. So, by default, offline/local help search automatically includes results that only match part of your list of keywords. And depending on how you have your search filters set, this can result in a set of results that look no-where near what you wanted, or at least appear with a lot of "noise".
But there is some good news for those who haven't mastered this search. If you just can't seem to get the help you want or get used to partial matches, you can turn it off! Yup, just tell search to Stop It! How?? It's simply a Tools->Options setting.
Selecting the Tools menu, choose Options. In that dialog you should see a lovely tree view on your left where you will find a second level item (under Environment) called Help. When you click on Help, you'll see a few settings on the right. Uncheck the box for "Include partial matches in local search results".
Enjoy.
april
