Question

How do I filter out the Silverlight documentation when I’m developing WPF application in VS2008? It’s very annoying to get the help for the Silverlight version of the class when I press F1.

I’d prefer not to remove the documentation for Silverlight altogether since I will need it in the future, but some way to choose between WPF and Silverlight help would be great.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I blogged this last week. It does ‘remove’ the silverlight docs, or rather hides them from the index until the day that you decide to add them back in.

In order to fix this right click on the VS2008 icon and run as an administrator. Choose the Index option from the Help menu. In the search box type “collection manager” – and click on the Help option in the index list. Uncheck the “Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK Documentation” collection then click Update VSCC. Close the Document Explorer and Visual Studio. You must open Document Explorer from Help/Index within Visual Studio, starting MSDN directly is not enough.

Now try pressing F1 on one of those pesky topics that exist in both .NET and Silverlight (I used the Add method on a Dictionary class) and wait while Document Explorer updates itself, that long slow horrible process. Once complete you should find that you’re back to seeing the .NET help by default and not the Silverlight help.