Summary: How to repair the local content store when a previous version of Help 3 was installed.
Issue: If you install the Microsoft Help 3 Beta 2 release and reuse the local content folder that was created by a previous version of Microsoft Help 3, your local content store may be left in a corrupted state. To remove the corrupted local store you can do the following:
· Locate the existing local store folder.
· Delete the content in the existing local store (details below).
· Configure Help Library Manager to rebuild the store.
We strongly advise that you backup your computer before performing this or any procedure that modifies files on your computer.
By default the local store folder is %PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Help3. For example, on a machine running Vista, the default store is c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Help3. Use the following steps to locate or confirm the current local store folder.
1 Launch Help Library Manager from the Visual Studio 2010 IDE by clicking the Help> Manage Help Settings. Help Library Manager will launch. If Help Library Manager cannot be run due to the current state of the local store, see the note at the end of this post.
2 In Help Library Manager, click the Settings link located on the top right side of the application window. The settings window will display:
The location of your local store is show in the lower half of the screen. Make note of this folder. The following steps will remove the existing local store files.
3 Exit Help Library Manager.
4 If the Help Listener tray application is running, right click the icon and click "exit". The following image shows the icon for the tray application:
5 Using Windows Explorer, navigate to the local store folder.
6 Remove all files and directories except the vs_100_en-us.cab file.
7 From the Start menu, find notepad.exe. Right click notepad.exe and click “Run as administrator”.
8 From notepad, open the file named HelpLibManager.exe.config. This file is stored with the Help Viewer binary files. It will be located in \Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Help\v3.0\ or \Program Files\Microsoft Help\v3.0\, depending on your machine.
9 Edit the configuration file to set the FirstTimeRun attribute value to “True” : <add key="FirstTimeRun" value="True" />
10 Save and close the file.
11 Launch Help Library Manager. (See step 1). You will be prompted to enter a location for the local store.
Click OK or select a new location. You can now install content using the “Find content on disk” or “Find content online” options shown in the main window.
If Help Library Manager cannot be run due to the current state of the local store, you can still recover by performing these actions in a slightly different order:
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Perform steps 7 - 11 described above.
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Note the folder name and click cancel to exit Help Library Manager. This is the location of your local content store.
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Perform steps 4 -6. (You will skip steps 7-10 because you already did them.)
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Perform step 11 again to confirm the location or select a new location. Click OK.
You are now ready to install content.
Regards,
The MS Help System Team
I referred to it earlier - MSDN low-bandwidth view. What is it!?!?
Watch this video that one of our dev leads made and check out the extensive background blog done by Scott Hanselman.
Then, let us know what you think! Put your comments here or e-mail us directly! This low-band view gives you a sneak peek at the new offline view for Visual Studio 2010 product documentation.
- AprilR
Hey, what's that there? When you hit F1 or go to the Help menu and select Visual Studio Product Documentation, you get....no longer DExplorer, you get your web browser opening to MSDN online! While there is no offline help, for Beta 1, we will be providing it in the next Beta. In the short term, you can essentially get a sneak peek at the new offline view by switching on the new 'low-bandwidth' (loband, we call it) view in the MSDN library. We are looking for your feedback on the level and quality of functionality you find there! We'll post more about the low-bandwidth story later.
What else is happening in Beta 1? Here are some good sources for you:
A great long post on all the goodness packed into this release is on Jason Zander's blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonz/archive/2009/05/18/announcing-vs2010-net-framework-4-0-beta-1.aspx
Rico Mariani's blog talks about some of the improvements he worked on (including help!):
http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-10-your-performance-feedback-plus-beta-1.aspx
Daniel Ferndandez's blog has a great cheat sheet:
http://blogs.msdn.com/danielfe/archive/2009/05/20/visual-studio-2010-beta-1-cheat-sheet.aspx
What can we say about the full help story coming in Beta 2? I talked with Terry Clancy about this, and he created this great summary below. I want to add that other vendors such as Helpware and Madcap are also keeping tabs on our work to make sure they can support their customers as well!
Visual Studio Help
Visual Studio 10 will come with a completely re-engineered Help system that introduces a new flexible, standards based Help framework which will ultimately be used in other products beyond Visual Studio. Help3 is a help system replacement for Microsoft Help 2.x . This new help system will be easier to produce content for, and will interfere less with Visual Studio itself. The standards based approach delivers not only a much better local experience but also a seamless transition to an online web browser and with infrastructure and tooling much more consistent other Visual Studio and internet technologies.
Visual Studio 2008 and prior versions use a proprietary help system in which content was normally packaged into .hxs or .chm file formats. With VS2010 these formats will go away and moving forward help content will be stored primarily XHTML, will be packaged into Zip-format containers. These containers will be based on the PKZip format. These containers can conceivably hold any type of content, from HTML to XML, from art to videos. The containers will have a special file extension (.mshc – Microsoft Help Content Container). Specific XML tags are used to control the behavior of the Help system. For example special tags are used to define “Contents” hierarchy and “Index” listings and “F1” help behavior. Viewers will access a specific topic through a URI provider using a standards protocol being defined for the purpose.
The primary Visual Studio 2010 help viewer will be a web browser (for either local or remote use). At some stage third party viewers applications will also be supported but this may not be a supported scenario in the VS2010 release.
The new help system uses a custom full text search engine to index the VS (and partners’) help content providing a best of breed search speed and experience
The new storage architecture enables many new rich scenarios. For example, VSIP partners can now add new containers of content to designated locations and have those tied to product content through the properties. Partner pages can be created as children of pages that are part of the standard Visual Studio help, thus they would then appear in the Help content tree under the standard Visual Studio pages.
The main implication for partners that extend Visual Studio is the need to migrate any help documentation and content to the work with the new Visual Studio help. Microsoft is working with Help Authoring product companies such as Component One (Doc2Help) and Innovasys (Help Studio) to work towards their support of this new format as soon as possible.
In the first version of this new help system, all APIs will be marked as internal and thus they can not be uses as extensibility points. In later versions of this software we plan to mark specific APIs as external to expose then as extensibility points for partners.
Stay tuned!
- AprilR
Microsoft Help 3.0 is the latest help platform. It will be used in Visual Studio 2010 and later released with other products and eventually opened up to all Windows ISVs! In three words Help 3 is: simple. fast. relevant.
Stay tuned for lots of good information about what-it-is, how-to-use-it, and how-to-get-it.
For a history of our project, see April Reagan's blog.
- April Reagan
