Preferred Collections

You may encounter the following message at the completion of MSDN installation: "MSDN Setup is going to set the preferred developer shell's F1 Help Collection to the 'MSDN Library - <version>' collection you are installing. Do you want MSDN Setup to do this?" If you select Yes, F1 Help from Microsoft developer products will be routed to the newly installed MSDN Library. If you select No, F1 Help from Microsoft developer products will route to the previous default collection.

Changing the Preferred Collection

The MSDN Library contains the Help files and documentation set for all the Visual Studio products. During Visual Studio installation, the MSDN Library Visual Studio 6.0 is set as the preferred document collection for F1 help and general documentation help. When installing a quarterly MSDN Library release, you may wish to designate that collection as the preferred collection for F1 help and general documentation help. The preferred collection can be changed in the Visual J++/Visual InterDev Integrated Development Environment (IDE), in Visual C++ through Tools, Options, Help System, or with the Collection Settings Tool.

Note   You should always close the MSDN window before changing the preferred Visual Studio document collection. If you change the preferred collection while MSDN is open, your change is not saved.

MSDN Library Collection Settings Tool

This utility enables you to change both your preferred language and your help collection settings.

Overview

The MSDN Library Collection Settings Tool enables you to change both your preferred language and your help collection settings. This is especially helpful for users of Visual Basic 6.0 and Microsoft Office 2000 Developer, since these tools have no user interface for changing the preferred language or help collection (unlike Visual C++ 6.0, Visual Interdev 6.0, and Visual J++ 6.0, which provide an interface for changing these settings under Tools/Options/Help System).

Installation

The MSDN Library Collection Settings tool became available for the first time with the English and Japanese versions of the MSDN Library – July 1999 release. The tool will be included in future HH 1.x based Libraries. A shortcut is added to the Microsoft Developer Network Start Menu item to provide easy and consistent access to the tool. The MSDN Library Collection Settings tool checks the registry for installed collections and offers you the option of selecting a new preferred help collection through a user interface.

Usage

To launch the MSDN Library Collection Settings tool, select the shortcut located in the Start menu under the Programs\Microsoft Developer Network group.

With the MSDN Library Collection Settings tool, you can choose your preferred help collection from a drop-down list of the documentation collections installed on your machine. For example, newer installations may include updated versions of topics, or you might customize a collection with preferences such as bookmarks, search subsets, and so forth.

• Preferred Language. With the MSDN Library Collection Settings tool, you can choose the language in which you prefer to read your references (provided that more than one language is available with your MSDN Library installation) by making your selection from the MSDN Language drop-down list.
  
  
• Preferred Help Collection. The preferred help collection setting determines the MSDN Library release used for context sensitive help in Visual Studio Tools and Office Developer programming environments.

Network installation

In a network install environment of the MSDN Library, each user can set their preferred help collection.