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

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.