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Blog
VS11 Integrated Help
Jason Josephy’s Visual Studio 2012 Integrated Help Extension gives us the ability to integrate offline help into the VS 2012 IDE (just like we did in VS 2003/2003/2005/2008).  |
VS11 Help Debug
VS 2012 language Packs allow you to view VS and it's help in a foreign language. This is fine but developers often want to view VS UI in their own language and test foreign language help. I've achieved this by writing a small executable that sits between VS 11 and the help. As always thanks to the MS guys (Paul O'Rear, Jason Campbell and Malcolm Dickson) for taking time out to help me on this community project! VS11 Help Debug applicationThis is free to download. All you do is run the application and next time you run VS 11 and press F1, help will now call the debug app instead of VS Help and display the command line sent. Check "Auto Launch" to continue to open VS help or click "Launch VS11 Help" to manually launch help (using the displayed command line passed to us by VS11). Use the "Locale Override" to modify the locale. In the example below I have VS English UI installed. When I press F1 the debug app displays the command line. I've select locale Russian so help will be displayed in Russian. And that's it. Now you can have VS11 in one language while displaying Help in another language. Close the debug application and restart VS11, and now F1 works normally again. The bottom panel just shows some debug (command line parsed etc). Hope you find it useful. If you do drop me a line. A zip file contaning the EXE is attached to the end of this post. -- Rob  |
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VS11HelpDbg.zip
Search Result Version Text
Under VS 2010 we had little control over the search result version text (search item sub-text).
In VS 2012 (HV 2) a new topic meta statement Microsoft.Help.DisplayVersion is used to set search result version text. <meta name="Microsoft.Help.DisplayVersion" content="South Park v1.0" /> For a further discussion see our article Search Result Version Text |
Foreign Language Help
How do I install and test my foreign language help in HV2? Using Language PacksHelp Viewer language is locked to the Visual Studio UI language. To change the UI & Help language you need to download and install the required language pack. To select a different language and access the language pack download page go to (VS main menu) "Tools > Options > Environment > International Settings". Click the link to access the Language Pack download page. You can download and install one language pack at a time (Tip: When the "Save As: dialog appears prefix the file name with the locale code). Installation can take several minuets to complete and a reboot is required. Once installed, the new language is available in the language drop-down (see above). Here (below) I've selected French, but notice that English downloads are still available.  As a matter of interest, you can see the Help registry changes after I installed French & Japanese language packs (I had opened Help Manager but hadn't downloaded anything).  English UI & Foreign HelpDevelopers like to test foreign language help under an English UI (or their own language). VS 2012 doesn't allow this. Or does it? If we created a broker application to sit between Visual Studio 2012 and VS Help Viewer we could easily switch the language. See our VS11 Help Debug application. |
VS 2012 Integration Notes
HV 2.0 Problems and Fixes
This is a collection of common problems and possible fixes. Many of these posts come from Help guru Jason A. Campbell-MSFT - Thanks Jason. HV2 Security IssuesThe problem is that the content store is shared for all users and content consists of more than just text. The potential to include behaviors, scripts, etc. into content that could be left as a "sleeper" for future users/administrators to execute has made our security model more complex that I really like. In VS 2010 our security model to handle this was to allow for administrators to delegate content install of certain types of content. The fact that only some content was allowed to be installed by non-administrators caused a lot of confusion and the general feedback we got was that you had to be administrator to install content since 3'rd party content was shipped in formats that we could not validate (e.g. MSHC files instead of signed CABs). For Dev 11 (VS 2012) we have followed that feedback and now require all content install to be done from administrator. We also tried to take a look at the different enterprise deployment scenarios. The deployment you might want to work with IT department on would be to have a single content store on a UNC path that all instances of VS on your network use. That would allow for them to update once for the network. Alternately the update can be scripted as a command line and pushed to machines in a similar method as any MSI install. If this is going to be a problem (e.g. your IT department cannot/will not manage content) please file a connect bug to have us re-evaluate our requirements. Also post the link to this thread so others can vote on it. Jason -- See full thread Sharing HV2 ContentThe administrator's guide was written to be a reference guide for these types of problems. I'll do my best to cover your questions but if I miss something it might help. For network share: The content store location is stored in a registry key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Help\v2.0\Catalogs\VisualStudio11\LocationPath for dev11). During scripted deployment of VS our expectation is that the store will be moved if desired. Doing this allows for an IT department to pick a standard location for help either on the machine or on a UNC path. For UNC we do advise having only one machine/user do the content administration however multiple machines can view content while this occurs. There is always a risk of having the issue you describe, this could occur either on a local machine with multiple users or on a share. The network does add complexity that increases the chances. We tried to minimize the risk but I cannot guarantee you will never see the issue. Here is what we are doing for content install: When we install/update content the operation occurs in a separate folder from the normal content store. The last step of install is to move the files to the store. These files are versioned so there should be no collision with current files. Once the move is complete HlpCtntMgr raises an install complete message and goes idle for a few seconds so the viewers can reconnect and load the new files. After this idle time the previous files are deleted. If a file is still locked we leave it in place, all files that should be deleted will have a ".delete." file added to the content store subsequent content management runs will attempt to delete the file as well so eventually the lock should be gone and the file will be deleted. For scripting: All content install is done from HelpCtntMgr.exe; this application takes command line switches. One of the possible operations is "refresh" that will check for updates against the endpoint and install them if available. Jason -- See full thread Proxy ProblemsWhen I attempt to open help from the VS2012 it launches Microsoft Helper Viewer 2.0 but generates an error. Below is the error from the event log. From IE I can access the same page (http://services.mtps.microsoft.com/ServiceAPI/catalogs/VisualStudio11/en-US) without any errors. An error occurred while checking for updates: Microsoft.VisualStudio.Help.CacheLib.CacheLibServiceApiException: The web server has reported an error for http://services.mtps.microsoft.com/ServiceAPI/catalogs/VisualStudio11/en-US: ProtocolError/ProxyAuthenticationRequired
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