VS2010 Tips #3: Updating multiple Visual Studio 2010 Help content with a single download

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.