Now and then we receive support tickets from people saying
that their MSDN and VisualStudio help had disappeared after installing Telerik
RadControls suite. Such an issue could be very frustrating, indeed. Much wiser
man has said once in a book DONT PANIC.The solution is easy and quick to do. You only need to Repair
your MSDN/VisualStudio installation. This will take about half an hour at most
and wont break your current application settings. You can repair the
installation by using the Change option in Add/Remove programs dialog:
Youll probably ask Why dont you fix this once and
forever?.
We suspect the main reason for this behavior to be caused by
a bun in the older MSHelp2 runtime. You can check the runtime version that
youre using in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Help. Go there
and hover either hxds.dll or hxvz.dll file. Youll see the version
number in the tooltip.2.1.9466.0
or 2.2.3077.0 (they say that it
fixes the disappearing TOC problem, but it doesnt).
If you dont have /Help
folder, you should probably have /Help 8
or /Help 9(for those who have Orcas
betas). In this case its very unlikely to have problems with missing MSDN
files.
The root of the problem is the way we structure and register
RadControls documentation in the MSDN/VisualStudio help namespace. We use an
empty collection for a container for all RadControls help files (thus they
appear under the same node in Table of Contents). Registering an empty
collection is the reason for disappearing files. Strangely it doesnt happen on
each machine that has the runtime version mentioned above so it was difficult
to trace the exact problem as it never happened on my machine. Actually Ive
seen this on 3 or 4 machines in Telerik.
You can read more about how to register Telerik Help 2 files
in this article: http://www.telerik.com/support/documentation/ms-help-2.aspx
Some of the content is based on information taken from www.helpware.net a great resource for
technical writers.