This seems to be a never ending story, having a locally installed Books Online for SQL Server, that is. Some of you recall that I have posted about this before. This post is about my experiences for the current state of Books Online. Things has changed since I last blogged this. Among other things, MS has re-worked the documentation, including moving the online bit from MSDN to docs.
Background: I have a new machine, and with that I of course want to have a local Books Online for SQL Server. Following any of my previous post didn’t quite work. Here is what I installed:
- Windows 10, fresh installation
- SQL Server 2016 (Db engine, SSIS, SSRS)
- Patch above to current service pack and CU.
- SQL Server Data Tools – BI
- SSMS 17.2
- Visual Studio 2017
There are of course other stuff on the machine as well, but I doubt that affect the SQL Server BOL experience. Here’s what I did to get local BOL inside SSMS:
- Help
- Add and Remove Help Content
- Under “SQL Server” header, I just added the bits that I found interesting. In my case everything.
- Update
- Now it took a long while, since I missed the VS installation a monster-sized doc for Framework. I later removed the VS bits.
- I was also afraid that I experienced a bug in Help Viewer, where it would hang. It took a long while with status something like removing temp files. But it ended just fine, I didn’t have to do the “kill, update help config file, and stuff”, like I did before.
Bottom line is that it worked just as I expected, or perhaps I should say “hoped for”. 🙂
(Well, almost. Some entries are doubled. I don’t actually bothered (much) about that so I just ignore that. For instance under “SQL Server Technical Documentation” I have two of both “Overview” and “Release Notes”.)
What more? Well, we probably want local BOL to be the “F1”-help:
- Help
- Set Help Preference
- Launch in Help Viewer
Also, your might want to create a shortcut (on desktop, start menu, or wherever), which points to:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Help Viewer\v2.2\HlpViewer.exe” /catalogName SSMS17 /locale en-US
For reference, here are two prior posts on the subject. But don’t go there, they will confuse you. I only list them here as a reference, and *in case* you might end up with a hung help viewer etc…
Bol 2016 blog 1
Bol 2016 blog 2