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

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

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