Sunday, April 03, 2005

Integrate the latest MSDN Library Help with VC++ 6

*See update at bottom of this entry*

There is an awesome article just published on Code Project that shows how to Integrate the latest MSDN Library Help with VC++ 6. Although you can simply download the demo project and follow the instructions after "How to set the default help collection?" at the end of the article, the article itself is a great primer on reverse engineering.

Of course, the newer-than-October-2001 MSDN libraries do not have the help files for the actual Visual C++ 6 development environment and/or compiler, if you are still using VC6, I would hope you don't need this documentation anymore.

I am curious why Microsoft did not include this integration ability (with the normal caveats) with the newer MSDN libraries, but I guess they sold a couple of extra copies of Studio .NET this way...

UPDATE: With this plugin enabled, I get a sharing violation on the .opt file if opening the project from explorer - a double-click or "Open With". Opening Visual Studio, then opening the workspace seems to not have this problem. Please let me know if you have similar problems.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have the same problem with "sharing violation".
At the moment I Haven't any solution.
Good luck

Steven Bone said...

I haven't been able to resolve it or track down the cause myself. I just make sure to open Studio before opening the workspace, which is a pain for the ever dwindeling number of projects still using VC6...