In this blog post, I want to show you how to change the path of the Local Help Library.

Let’s say you want to move the location of the local content being stored. You can simply move the files and change the path.

Where is it stored now? run the Help Library Manager

Then click Settings

That is the current location. You can copy the contents of that folder to somewhere. (for this example, I move my help contents to D:\DUMMY FILES\HelpLibrary\)

Then open Registry Editor

and then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE –> SOFTWARE –> Microsoft –> Help –> v1.0

Change the value of LocalStore with the path of the new location

In this case I changed it to D:\DUMMY FILES\HelpLibrary\

Okay, now go to the new location then edit the /manifest/queryManifest.3.xml using Notepad

Modify the following to match the new location

So, for this example it will become like this

That’s it!

You can test it by running Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Documentation

Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

Microsoft just gave a sneak peek to the new Window Live Hotmail, representing the next generation in personal email. Practical innovations has been introduced to help people manage the clutter and regain control of their inboxes – efficiently and the new features will become available to customers world-wide from  mid-2010.

A quick overview of the key updates:

Stay better organized

Today’s inboxes are overflowing with mail that most people consider junk, even though it’s mail that’s legitimate.  To help keep inboxes clean and organized, the new Hotmail delivers the first and only virtual broom, enabling customers to easily “sweep” unwanted mail out of their inbox.  It also helps cut through clutter with intelligent filters that in a single click will filter the entire inbox to show mail just from contacts, just social network alerts, or just mail from the groups users belong to.

Manage your social networks from your inbox

With the new Hotmail, customers will be able to see rich previews of photos and videos from popular sites like Flickr, YouTube, Hulu and SmugMug, and see the status of tracked packages in real time, inside their emails. They’ll also be able to accept invitations to connect with someone on a social or professional networking site like LinkedIn – all from the convenience of their inboxes. 

Increased attachment size

One of the biggest changes to Hotmail is the increased ability to manage and share personal photos and documents. Today, people are sharing over 1.5 billion photos and   350 million Microsoft Office documents per month in Hotmail.  Still, the “attachment size problem” remains, regardless of which mail service people use.  The new Hotmail lets’ customers send up 10 GB of attachments (200 attachments – each up to 50 MB in size) in a single message, erasing worries of attachment size limits. 

You can find out more at http://hotmailpreview.com

Hotmail · Windows Live

If you’re one of the fans of Multiple Document window layout in previous versions of Visual Studio, you will miss that feature in Visual Studio 2010.

Below is the options of Visual Studio 2008

And this is the option of Visual Studio 2010

Yep the setting of Multiple document is no longer there.

That would not be a big issue. Visual Studio 2010 has new feature Floating Window. You can make the editor window to float by simply right clicking the tab title and choose Float.

The editor window is now floating. You can drag anywhere.

To dock it back, you can do from Window –> Dock as Tabbed Document

This feature is better isn’t it? You can even drag it to the external display

Tips & Tricks · VS2008 · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

It’s been few weeks after Silverlight 4 release. Now you can grab the final release Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010. That tool will also install the the final release of WCF RIA Services 1.0

If you have previously installed the tools, you don’t need to worry, it will uninstall them automatically.

Silverlight 4 · VS2010 · WCF RIA Services

Sometimes not well-coded extensions/add-ons can cause very annoying error. If you got any error in running Visual Studio 2010, especially if you use lot of 3rd party extensions/add-ons, then running Visual Studio 2010 in Safe Mode will be worth to try.

The Safe Mode will disable all extensions, that way you will know whether the error you got is Visual Studio error or caused by installed extensions.

To run Visual Studio in Safe Mode, you can type devenv.exe /safemode in Visual Studio command line or from Run window.

More about running Visual Studio in Safe Mode:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241278.aspx

Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

Simply drag-n-drop the jQuery library from Solution Explorer to the opened external JavaScript file.

The Intellisense should work now.

Make donation to this article:

Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

Incompatible add-ons or system configurations can cause Visual Studio issues (performance issue, error, etc).

Fortunately we can try to troubleshoot the issues by referring to the Visual Studio activity log.

Simply run the following command to run Visual Studio 2010 and log its all activities.

The log file will be generated to:

XP

%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\Visual Studio\10.0\ActivityLog.xml

Vista & Windows 7

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\ActivityLog.xml

You can also specify where you want the log file to be generated

Once you run it, 2 files will be generated

And when you open the ActivityLog.xml, it will contain something like this:

Hope this helps.

Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

By default Visual Studio 2010 comes with Intellisense feature enabled. By the way, there are some cases that it’s disabled – can be caused by anything (setting changes on add-in installation, importing settings, human error, your teammate , etc).

The fix is simple, just open the Tools –> Options, then go to the Text Editor section. Select All Languages or specific language (in this example C#).

Then make sure Auto list members and Parameters information are checked. Click OK and it should be working now.

intellisense · Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

If you’re not comfortable with Visual Studio 2010’s help viewer (Microsoft Help Viewer 1.0), then H3Viewer will be a good alternative for you.

This is much like the help viewer of Visual Studio 2005 ad Visual Studio 2008.

What are you waiting for? Download it for FREE.

H3Viewer · Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips

Visual Studio 2010 comes with a new Help viewer. If you didn’t realize that, run the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Documentation and you will see what I mean (I assume you have installed it when you’re installing VS2010).

Even though it provides lighter experience and updateable help contents, the pain starts when you’re updating the help contents. See this.

I highlighted the estimate download size. Unfortunately we can’t choose which library content to update, so we cannot reduce it.

I have VS2010 installed in my 2 computers, so you can calculate the size I will need to update the contents.

How about a team of 100 developers? how much the download size needed?

Fortunately there is workaround for this written in Paul O’Rear’s blog.

Let me copy over the steps:

1. On a single machine, launch Help Library Manager from the Visual Studio 2010 IDE using Help | Manage Help Settings
2. Install and update any content that you wish to be available on all other machines using Help Library Manager.
3. Open the settings screen from Help Library Manager, by clicking on the Settings link on the upper right. Note the path of the Local Store that should appear grayed out in the lower half of the dialog. The default path if you did not change anything during setup would be: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Microsoft\HelpLibrary. In Windows 7 this will probably translate to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary.
4. On any other machine that you wish to update with the same changes
   1. Ensure that the Help system is closed down – close any browser that may currently be displaying local help. Ensure that you are not running Help Library Manager and that the Help Library Agent is also closed down (right click on the Help Library Agent tray application and select Exit).
   2. Copy the entire Help Library folder from the first machine over to the same location on the machine you wish to update.

There is also important to highlight from his post.
”Please note that this is not a supported scenario. We recommend taking a backup before proceeding with these steps! Please note also that you will need to have Admin privileges on any machine that you wish to perform this operation.”

Hope this information helpful for you.

help-viewer · Tips & Tricks · VS2010 · VS2010-Tips