Installing Help viewer without installing visual studio
I want to take some offline MSDN help files on a Windows machine that does not have visual studio installed. the problem is i can't find a way to get and install the reference library manager and the help viewer without installing visual studio or sql server. How can I install them without installing visual studio or sql server?
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I just wrote an answer on how to do this for an older question that can be found here .
For convenience, here are the basic steps for running Help Viewer 2.2 without having to install a full copy of Visual Studio 2015:
- Most of the files required by HlpViewer.exe can be found on the Visual Studio DVD in two different MSI packages. By passing in some additional msiexec command line arguments, it's pretty easy to set them manually:
msiexec.exe /i help3_vs_net.msi VS_SETUP=1
msiexec.exe /i vs_minshellcore.msi MSIFASTINSTALL="7" VSEXTUI="1"
While this installs the most needed files, it ignores them all ... to keep things simple, I copied the rest from the production installation to another machine:
- C: \ ProgramData \ Microsoft \ HelpLibrary2
Essentially only contains CatalogType.xml and some empty directories. - C: \ Program Files (x86) \ Microsoft Help Viewer \ v2.2 \ CatalogInfo \ VS11_en-us.cab
Additionally, you need to provide your application with valid ContentStore content by importing the following .reg file:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Help\v2.2\Catalogs\VisualStudio14]
"LocationPath"="%ProgramData%\\Microsoft\\HelpLibrary2\\Catalogs\\VisualStudio14\\"
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Help\v2.2\Catalogs\VisualStudio14\en-US]
"SeedFilePath"="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Help Viewer\\v2.2\\CatalogInfo\\VS11_en-us.cab"
"catalogName"="Visual Studio Documentation"
Finally, I created a new app shortcut and changed its Target: as follows:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Help Viewer\v2.2\HlpViewer.exe" /catalogName VisualStudio14 /launchingApp Microsoft,VisualStudio,14
Et voilà !, so that HlpViewer.exe should finally execute without problems!
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