Lately, bringing the help window from Visual Studio is taking a long time.
Even updating the help system takes an awful long time.
Is there something broken with my installation?
+9
A:
No, there's something broken in Visual Studio Help. It just sucks.
Once you've opened it, keep it open, so it doesn't have to reload. Or just don't use it, and look everything up online.
jalf
2009-05-12 12:28:45
It really is sad that the integrated help is pretty much unusable. One of the things I really loved about VB6 and the first IDEs for .net was how fast and relevant help was. You could hit F1 and see something useful in a flash. Now, if you can stand to wait for it to load, F1 shows you something from an obscure specialty library instead of what you want. How do they screw it up so badly?
JohnOpincar
2009-05-12 12:43:05
It's hilarious that I became annouyed, Googled, found this result and read to here...while my Visual Studio Help was loading!
Stuart Helwig
2010-02-01 01:13:55
A:
Hard to tell without more information. Did you install any addons lately? When I installed Resharper once, my Visual Studio became terribly slow. It could be something like this.
Or maybe, you have a very large solution open? (e.g one with many, many projects). This also slows Visual Studio down.
Razzie
2009-05-12 12:29:17
+2
A:
Perhaps it is trying to do more than you need it to do? By default it searches on line help as well as local information.
I went in to Tools, Options and disabled every on line option and it comes up instantly.
In my particular case, 99% of the time I'm just looking for syntax clarification or looking up class members. So the local help is what I need.
If I want to search MSN or Code Guru or something I can either re-enable it temporarily in the help or Google it.
Blair Mahaffy
2009-09-24 15:48:43
A:
I'm having the same problem with the new beta - anyone know why they (VS beta 2 2010 / VS express C++) takes so long to install? - is there a way to speed this up
Wallter
2010-01-08 15:35:22
A:
I'd guess either due to online dependencies, or because the core database is so humongous. Try disabling online stuff and see.
Personally I just google "blah blah blah msdn" and it does the same thing, but it's crazy this is faster than having the information on my hard disk.
John
2010-01-08 15:38:51