Home/ Questions/Q 44459
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-10T15:39:20+00:00

I’m experimenting with VS 2008 Express edition and when I hit f1 on a

  • 0

I’m experimenting with VS 2008 Express edition and when I hit f1 on a keyword or class name I seem to get the Information Not Found page more than 90% of the time.

Is this a configuration problem? Is it because this is the ‘free-as-in-beer’ Express edition? Did Microsoft move their online documentation since the version I downloaded?

I’m kind of amazed that here’s a demo of their flagship development product which seems to be missing almost any kind of integrated reference documentation. How is the integrated help in Visual Studio meant to work?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Keep in mind that the full MSDN Library for Visual Studio is massive – at the current time it is 2GB – so for this reason it’s offered as a separate download.

    There appears to be an abriged version which is 300MB, although I would suggest that you’d see the ‘Information Not Available’ message every now and then with that version installed.

    You can get them both for free from MSDN.

    Personally, I have the full version installed, but if you don’t want to download MSDN you can turn online help on by doing the following:

    In your Visual Studio product, select Tools -> Options from the application menu. Then select Environment -> Help -> Online in the Options dialog. Under ‘When loading Help content’ select ‘Try online first, then local’ and click OK

    • 0