Question

I’ve installed the MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, however, dynamic help in Visual Studio still spawns the RTM Document Explorer. Anyone know how to change it to the SP1 version?

Answer 1

Sometimes you see someone else struggling with the same things and that quickly reminds you are not alone.

So here is what you have to do:

1. Open Registry Editor using regedit.exe
2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Help\0x0409 – 0x0409 is for US english.
3. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Help\0x0409\Collection is a kind of pointer to a sub-key with the preferred collection.
4. Check what of the subkeys is the help collection for the MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 you just installed
5. Copy the sub-key name that you found on step 4.
6. Update the value of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Help\0x0409\Collection to the value of the copied sub-key.
7. Now Visual Studio opens your just installed help collection when using dynamic help.

Note: You may have to restart Visual Studio after executing these steps in order to make them effective.