Professional Visual Studio® 2008

5.10. Customizing Help

Just as with earlier versions of Visual Studio, you can customize the way the Help system works through a number of options. Rather than go through each one here, this section provides a summary of the options you may want to take a closer look at.

By default the Help system will look online for results and the contents of topics you're trying to look up. Only if it cannot find the results in the online system (or cannot contact the online documentation) will the Document Explorer try the local, offline version. The advantage of this is that you'll always have the most up-to-date information — a godsend for programmers who work with modern tools and find themselves frustrated with outdated documentation. However, if you have a slow or intermittent Internet connection, you may want to change this option to use the local version of the documentation first, or even not to search the online documentation at all. Both of these options are available from the Online group in the Options window (see Figure 5-20). You can also filter the Codezone Community groups down to only the sites you prefer.

Figure 5.20. Figure 5-20

The other main options group you may want to take a look at is the Keyboard group. This should be immediately familiar to you because it is a direct clone of the Keyboard group of options in Visual Studio 2008. It enables you to set keyboard shortcuts ...