Changes to the Help Installers in NetAdvantage 2012.2

Craig Shoemaker / Thursday, October 18, 2012

Summary

  • Help installers for Visual Studio 2008 are no longer available
  • The installer now supports Visual Studio 2010, Service Pack 1 (Help Viewer 1.1) and Visual Studio 2012 (Help Viewer 2.0)
  • There is a repairable known issue if you have both Visual Studio 2010, SP1 and Visual Studio 2012 installed on your machine

Available Help Formats

With the release of NetAdvantage 2012.2 we have made some changes to the available help installers that accompany our products which use the Visual Studio help format. First, we are no longer shipping help for Visual Studio 2008 (Help 2.X). The help versions that are now available are for:

  • Visual Studio 2010, Service Pack 1 (Help Viewer 1.1)
  • Visual Studio 2012 (Help Viewer 2.0)

We require the Visual Studio 2010, SP1 at a minimum because this allows us to ship pre-generated index files, which ultimately speeds up install time for both formats.

Known Issue

If you have both Visual Studio 2010, SP1 and Visual Studio 2012 installed, but do not have the local store setup for Visual Studio 2010, SP1, then the only help that is installed on the system is the Visual Studio 2012 format.

Fix

If you want the help in the Visual Studio 2010 format, then you need to to setup the local store. To do this, launch Manage Help Settings utility under Start > Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 > Tools > Manage Help Settings – ENU. Then select the location you wish to create the local store and press OK.

Set Local Visual Studio Content Location Dialog

Once you have setup the local store you can run a Repair mode on the NetAdvantage help installer to register with Visual Studio 2010, SP1.

Alternatively, you could also manually install the help, after setting up the local store, which is detailed in Installing Visual Studio 2010 Help for NetAdvantage for Windows Forms and ASP.NET Products, but the process now applies to all product lines.

Update: If you are running on an x64 operating system, and only have Visual Studio 2012 installed on your machine then the NetAdvantage Platform installer does not all you to install help of any format. This issue is being addressed an we hope to have a fix available shortly.