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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-18T11:56:11+00:00

When using keyword search in offline MSDN that came with VS2008, is there any

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When using “keyword search” in offline MSDN that came with VS2008, is there any way to exclude unnecessary classes / namespaces that I know beforehand is out of the scope of my search? The search “filter” seems way to broad for this purpose.

To be specific, when I search for a class, say “ListView”, I DO NOT want System.Web.UI class to show up as the first suggestion just because it is the first one alphabetically, and instead would like to see System.Windows.Forms.ListView as the document that comes up. I guess I could live with going to search result and browse through to find the intended class, or maybe typing class names with full namespace… But it would make my life easier if I could either temporary or even permanently (I know I won’t touch ASP.NET for a while) remove unnecessary classes from the search index.

TIA

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    After trying several options I found out that manually taking the .HXS files associated with the unneeded namespaces out of the MSDN directory (In my case, C:\Program Files\MSDN\MSDN9.0\1041) seems to do the trick. MSDN document explorer recreates help index on the next launch after the content of the directory was modified. So even in case you need the documentation again, you can restore the help by simply moving the files back into the original folder.

    The files I moved to take out System.Web.UI documentations were:

    fxref_system.web.ui.adapters.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.desi_obilecontrols.converters.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.design.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.design.mobilecontrols.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.design.webcontrols.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.design.webcontrols.webparts.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.htmlcontrols.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.mobi_s.adapters.xhtmladapters.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.mobilecontrols.adapters.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.mobilecontrols.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.webcontrols.adapters.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.webcontrols.hxs
fxref_system.web.ui.webcontrols.webparts.hxs

    Was pretty surprised when I saw this kind of somewhat primitive and forcible method to be the most effective…

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