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I really miss the old MSDN Library. The 5GB installable one you'd get as one of the 200 DVDs in that giant case they'd ship you with your MSDN subscription bac

I really miss the old MSDN Library. The 5GB installable one you'd get as one of the 200 DVDs in that giant case they'd ship you with your MSDN subscription back in the day. It was awesome. You could hit F1 and it would instantly pop up good, detailed, documentation for whatever method or keyword was under your cursor. In any of their developer products, so it worked as well in SQL Server Management Studio as in VS.NET. Every language, every technology, updated monthly via Automatic Updates on your dev box. But they stopped shipping it in favor of "web help". That's the thing where you hit F1 and it spends several seconds opening a web browser (a custom one in a new tab in the IDE for some reason), then several more seconds opening a "meet the mouse" style page telling you how to use the code editor window (which it had helpfully detected was your context when asking for help). So in one stroke, they switched from the worlds most awesome help system at your fingertips to "just go open Chrome and type your search into Google, since that will at least get you something relevant". Today, they've improved that workflow by trying to ensure that something relevant exists on MDN, provided you're searching for web-related stuff. We're still about 10 years back from the state-of-the-art in 2003. Shame.

chadaustin 9y ago
Yeah, the old installable MSDN Library was really great. I loved how they approached each topic with three types of documentation: tutorials, concept overviews, and types-and-functions references. I still have the CDs on my bookshelf because I can't bring myself to throw them away. :) Microsoft was really good at developer documentation. Apps like Dash and websites like devdocs.io come close to the same experience, at least.
ConfucianNardin 9y ago
VS2017 opens the correct documentation most of the time, and in the default web browser. For C++, cppreference provides archives of all their docs: http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives. Of course, that won't help you for Win32 or .NET. There's also https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/
- lorenzhs 9y ago
  There's also https://github.com/jeaye/stdman https://github.com/jeaye/stdman which provides the pages from cppreference as manpages, and https://github.com/aitjcize/cppman https://github.com/aitjcize/cppman (which I haven't used, but seems to look a bit nicer)
nashashmi 9y ago
Visual studio is not the only tool that went online. Many MS office products went this route. AutoCAD did too. However, AC has an option to download offline help. The office products have an option to stay offline. It does not work that well, in my experience. I guess some guy at MS thought: People look online for solutions; We should do that too! They broke things because the web browser was slow and the search results sucked. There is potential for improvement. The platform is set for that. But only if someone could go and do the work we would not be talking about this anymore.
- dx034 9y ago
  The help function in Excel has been so useless and disruptive to work over more than a decade that I know many people (Excel power users) who just removed the F1 key. It got slightly better with Office 2016 but is nowhere nearly as productive as just googling your problem.

chadaustin 9y ago

Yeah, the old installable MSDN Library was really great. I loved how they approached each topic with three types of documentation: tutorials, concept overviews, and types-and-functions references. I still have the CDs on my bookshelf because I can't bring myself to throw them away. :) Microsoft was really good at developer documentation. Apps like Dash and websites like devdocs.io come close to the same experience, at least.

ConfucianNardin 9y ago

VS2017 opens the correct documentation most of the time, and in the default web browser. For C++, cppreference provides archives of all their docs: http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives. Of course, that won't help you for Win32 or .NET. There's also https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/

lorenzhs 9y ago
There's also https://github.com/jeaye/stdman https://github.com/jeaye/stdman which provides the pages from cppreference as manpages, and https://github.com/aitjcize/cppman https://github.com/aitjcize/cppman (which I haven't used, but seems to look a bit nicer)

nashashmi 9y ago

Visual studio is not the only tool that went online. Many MS office products went this route. AutoCAD did too. However, AC has an option to download offline help. The office products have an option to stay offline. It does not work that well, in my experience. I guess some guy at MS thought: People look online for solutions; We should do that too! They broke things because the web browser was slow and the search results sucked. There is potential for improvement. The platform is set for that. But only if someone could go and do the work we would not be talking about this anymore.

dx034 9y ago
The help function in Excel has been so useless and disruptive to work over more than a decade that I know many people (Excel power users) who just removed the F1 key. It got slightly better with Office 2016 but is nowhere nearly as productive as just googling your problem.