When I accessed it from VS 2005, it only have SQL help available.
I have tried to reinstall it several time but no luck.
Any help would be appreciated.
Eric
I have the same problem, except that not even SQL help shows up. The Contents tab is empty. The Index tabs shows all keywords, but selecting them gives me an empty screen. It does say how many hits it got in the Index Results pane, it doesn't show me the actual hits.
Reinstall / Repair does not work. Running on a clean, fully patched Windows 2003 Server OS.
I read some posts about a similar problem in the beta 2 where the solution was to use the Archive Manager. However this doesn't seem to be installed or included in this release?!
Thomas
My install was on a clean machine that never had any beta code on it. I uninstalled and reinstalled to no avail. There should be some command to generate an index and table of contents. It looks like the files are there (but I am not an expert on VS help files).
For the most recent post, I'm wondering - what happens when you choose Index or Contents from the Help menu - do you see thousands of topics or just a handful? Do you get the same behavior in these cases:
1) Launch Visual Studio and choose Help->Contents
2) Launch MSDN from the Start Menu and choose Help->Contents
3) Launch Visual Studio Documentation from the Start Menu and choose Help->Contents
We've see a couple cases where customers had working Help from one entry point and not the other, and where launching one made the other one work.
Another thing that has worked is doing a "repair" on MSDN from Add/Remove programs
For those on the RC1 I would recommend cleaning off the machine and installing the RTM version of VS2005. It definitely isn't a known issue that Help is broken. Does the error message come up before the Help application renders? Do you get the same behavior for each of the entry points described above? And for each entry on the Help menu of VS & Dexplore (Index vs. Contents vs. Search)?
Again - sorry for frustration, hopefully we'll get you in a working state soon!
Thanks,
Jeremy Jones
I have since fixed the problem by uninstalling VS 2003, VS 2005, and all .NET controls. I then reinstalled VS 2003, VS 2005, and then the controls (mostly for VS 2003).
But I have a new problem. In the process of troubleshooting this problem, I downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2005 SDK. It wasn't any help (but a utility called Namespace from a beta version was helpful). Since I didn't need it, I uninstalled it (following the directions in the readme).
This broke the Collection Manager. All I got were error messages that it was unable to find the Visual Studio 2005 SDK. Nothing else was displayed. So I have reinstalled the SDK and the Collection Manager works again. I don't know if this is a problem with the Collection Manager or the SDK.
I'd like to see an end-user tool for repairing and modifying Help 2.0. Some of the VS 2003 controls installed themselves in the VS 2005 collection and there seems no way to remove them because they are not listed in the Collection Manager.
Thanks for your response.
Herbert Swearengen
Started a clean Virtual Machine (VMWare not MS since no USB support)
Installed Windows XP Professional SP 1
Installed Windows XP Service Pack 2
Installed the latest windows updates as at 9 Nov 2005
Installed RTM Visual Studio 2005 (Full)
Installed the MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2005
Note that the install image was download from the MSDN subscribers website
Start-> MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2005
Message box appears stating:
Microsoft Document Explorer cannot be shown because the specified help collection 'ms-help://MS.MSDNQTR.v80.en' is invalid.
I have not managed to fix this issue.
Should be easy for you guys to recreate. I've tried this twice starting from a clean VM and always the same result.
Thanks much,
Jeremy Jones
I finally managed to fix this.
I had unpacked all VS.NET ISO images in a directory using WinRar. So far this technique has always worked and saves me the hassle of burning a CD/DVD. Unfortunately it didn't work with the MSDN DVD ISO. Something gets corrupted, but no error message is shown (until you run the app).
A similar thing happens when using Microsoft Virtual CD control tool to mount the DVD. No error message, but also results in a similar corrupted install.
I figured this might have something to do with the image size (2+Gb) and both tools were having issues with it. (just love those 32bit limits)
So I installed Daemon Tools and installed MSDN from there. Now everthing works like a charm.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Thomas
Uninstalled MSDN
Installed Daemon Tools
Mounted the DVD ISO image
Installed from the mounted drive
Still the same problem
Could it be that the image is somehow corrupt? Surely there would be some kind of hash of the image to avoid this problem.
Anway, still trying to get this working from the ISO image. When the DVD arrives in our MSDN sub I'll give that a try.
I downloaded the VS 2005 DVD ISO (released version), burned it to a DVD and installed it on a machine that also has VS 2003.
Not only does the help not show up for VS2005, but now VS2003 help is empty too. When I say help does not show up, I mean that Index, Search, and Contents are simply empty.
To answer your question from above, here is what happens
1) Launch Visual Studio and choose Help->Contents Empty, same with Index, Contents, Favorites etc.
2) Launch MSDN from the Start Menu and choose Help->Contents Error message (the same as title of this post)
3) Launch Visual Studio Documentation from the Start Menu and choose Help->Contents Error message (the same as title of this post)
What can we do to help you identify the problem?
Google shows this was an issue in the Beta's too so possibly it was never fixed properly.
Please download and install the Visual Studio Help Integration Kit.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/htmlhelp/html/hwmscextendingnethelp.asp
This contains a utilty called Namespace.exe which is an explorer-like interface into the HTML Help 2.0 system.
When you run this utility any problems will be highlighted with a red icon. If you could post the information on these problem namespaces it would help us.
See the screenshots here
What's next?
I dont know if this will help you diagnose the problem, but here is something I tried.
Remeber (from my post above), after installing VS 2005 not only did MSDN for 2005 not work it also affeceted MSDN for 2003, so I decided to uninstall MSDN for 2003, then reinstall it. After doing so MSDN for 2003 works fine.
Afterwards, when I first opened MSDN for 2005, it noticed the chagnes, paused for a few minutes and for the most part it works now.
MSDN for 2005 works fine if opened from Visual Studio, but if I launch it from the start menu everything works except for the contents tab, which is blank.
