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I spend a lot of time offline, and while normally I'm in the middle of some book or magazine for work, I've recently been reading through the MSDN Library documentation of Visual Studio 2010 Application Lifecycle Management (aka TFS 2010).

Unfortunately, this documentation doesn't seem to be included on either the Vs2010 nor the VsAlm2010 installation media anymore, and I can't find any downloads for it...does it simply not exist except in online form?

I'd find it hard to believe that the only way to get at this documentation would be to hit a website for every request. What am I missing?

Mogsdad
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bwerks
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5 Answers5

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Wow - I'm a little surprised. Even on the MSDN Subscriber download site, the MSDN library downloads only go up to 2007.

But, you can tell the VS 2010 installation to install the content locally.

Go to "Help|Manage Help Settings" and under "Choose online or local help" select "I want to use local help".

You can also use the Help Manager to install online help updates locally. This might get the specific docs you're looking for (TFS ALM) pulled down - I'm not sure, but might be worth a try.

Michael Burr
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  • Absolutely perfect! I assume that the direct downloads were taken off of MSDN because they're being managed (and quite well, it seems) through this library manager thing. .NET 4.0, Visual Studio (all versions), Phone7, and indeed ALM--basically anything that takes up significant space on MSDN is available through the library manager. This thing is awesome! Just needs to be a little more discoverable, maybe. – bwerks Oct 15 '10 at 06:34
  • On my "Help|Manage Help Settings" I dont have any options other than the local path; so I have no way of downloading the data or doing anything ... any ideas where I can get it. – Dan Jan 15 '12 at 21:41
  • Aha, I have to run Visual Studio under Administrator to get the options – Dan Jan 15 '12 at 21:44
  • Which, incidentally, sucks for people who don't get admin access on their local machine. Thanks, Microsoft. – jjlin Feb 06 '12 at 20:29
3

Related: Download Windows API reference (MSDN) for offline use

Community
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mmdemirbas
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2

Install Zeal and add MSDN docset feed - this will give you rather a huge (it contains 41'181 method, for example) flat list of methods, constants, classes etc, not something as nicely laid out as MSDN site, but the search is lightning fast. Download size is ~3'400Mb;

or

Use VSHD to download offline help files for Visual Studio Help Viewer (applicable for VS 2012+) - this offers you the pleasure of leaving VS itself firewalled as it honestly should be. Download size varies.

sunny moon
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https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34794

This download includes an ISO image file of the Visual Studio and .NET Framework documentation—overviews, how-to articles, API reference pages, sample code, and more—to help you in your development efforts.

Version: See file name. File Name: VS2012Documentation.iso VS2013Documentation.iso Date Published: 6/10/2014 File Size: 2.7 GB 4.0 GB

vellaichamy
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If you have installed Visual Studio completely, you will find it locally. Goto Help > View Help or Press 'Ctrl + F1'

Rakesh Burbure
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