Well yes it was online in that sense, which was great. But what I meant to point out was that the complete MSDN help library came shipped on two CDs that you co

Well yes it was online in that sense, which was great. But what I meant to point out was that the complete MSDN help library came shipped on two CDs that you could locally install. It was really really good. There was a description, detailed background info, and usually at least a few example code snippets using the function. I was later a astonished at how sparse and useless documentation for many other libraries/languages was compared to that, especially when it came to example usage. Some notable disappointments included e.g. the Java/JDK docs (v1.4) and the early Android docs (v1), which both required looking at the code because the docs were severely lacking (both have improved by now). I think you can still download the whole MSDN help library for offline use, but I don't believe that nowadays that would be enough for daily work use. Lots of useful info and example use is scattered around blog posts and StackOverflow answers now, instead of being a part of the documentation itself.