VS2008 – Online Help finally useful!

After installing Visual Studio 2008 I usually turn off 2 help options: “Partial Matching” and “Online Help”.

“Partial Matching” because it returns way too many results.

“Online Help” because it slows down searches.

While searching for the syntax to check a VARIANT_BOOL, I decided to give it a try.  Lo and Behold, the Online Help returned something useful!  Looks like specifications showing up on MSDN library might not be a bad thing after all…

Making Dynamic Help Faster

Dynamic Help is a panel in Visual Studio that displays links to help relevant to whatever action you've recently taken. So if you click on the word Form in the derivation statement (so that it refers to the System.Windows.Forms.Form class) then several links to documentation about the Form class will show up.

It's a great way to learn about what's available while you're working; a sort of "learning in the background". Unfortunately the out of the box configuration can be a little slow. To speed things up:

1. Reduce the number of links displayed. Go to Tools -> Options -> Environment -> Help -> Dynamic Help then check "Limit number of links per category" and enter a number smaller than 10 in the box on the right. I use 3.
2. Reduce the number of categories.
3. Reduce the number of Topic types.
4. Try some of the other options.

For step 1, 3 has turned out to be the magic number for me. So I leave everything else turned on.