what i hate about help ... | The Coffeehouse

... is its 'speed' (if thats the correct term to use here)

ok, i admit its ok for help to initially load for some time. (although this sucks too.)

but why is it, that although i have everything installed locally to my hard disk, that searching for anything is _much_ ___MUCH__ slower in the help system that is installed on my maching than in google? (or even msdn online !)

its so slow, the help browser sometimes even gets a timeout and displays an 'resource currently not available page' !

man, that sucks.

WM_FRUSTRATED
thomas woelfer

Blkbam

twoelfer wrote:

searching for anything is _much_ ___MUCH__ slower in the help system that is installed on my maching than in google? (or even msdn online !)

Well, Google has a few (hundreds I think) servers dedicated to cataloging, searching and returning results from web queries.

MS also has servers dedicated to searches on their MSDN online.

The keywords here are "dedicated" & "server". I don't know the power of your machine but running the IDE, help and whatever else you have installed running at the same time may be dragging your system down.

If your system is up to snuff then it may be time for a defrag or you could turn on file indexing.

Jaz

i agree, help is a very slow process. Does MS recomend we install the help files ona dual Xeon 4gb mem 15krpm scsi server? lol

Andrew Davey

Roll on WinFS! That should hopefully sort out your searching woes!

Shining Arcanine

twoelfer wrote:

... is its 'speed' (if thats the correct term to use here)

ok, i admit its ok for help to initially load for some time. (although this sucks too.)

but why is it, that although i have everything installed locally to my hard disk, that searching for anything is _much_ ___MUCH__ slower in the help system that is installed on my maching than in google? (or even msdn online !)

its so slow, the help browser sometimes even gets a timeout and displays an 'resource currently not available page' !

man, that sucks.

WM_FRUSTRATED
thomas woelfer

My hope is that Microsoft will look at all of the databases (e.g. indexing service, help, registry, etc) in Windows and say, "how can we make this faster?" Hopefully they could use the Yukon technology to speed things up.

Jeremy W.

Far as I'm aware this is something the team's are working incredibly hard on. I'm not sure speed was one of the primary goals, but at soon as search became an 'integrated feature' it really would have to be, otherwise customers would be very frustrated.

While some people don't like MS products, it's rare that they set a goal and don't hit it. They produce quality software.

twoelfer

Jeremy,

i have been working with microsoft compilers (and help) since microsoft C 5.0 for ms-dos.

and quite frankly, while the quality of the documentation itself got better with every single release, the usability degraded with every single release. right now, at least for me, its almost unusable.

i you think that the current help system is 'quality software', you seem to have a different meaning for the term 'quality'.

this is not only about the speed of that thing. did you notice its almost impossible to paste anything from help into the ide editor without first going through notepad? this also sucks.

and what about that stupid 'instant help' in the current ide that everybody tries to get rid of...?

WM_MY0.02$
thomas woelfer

Scottsw

Thomas,

Which version of Visual Studio Help are you talking about? Are you running the March Community Technology Preview release of Whidbey?

-Scott

Steve411

"... is its 'speed' (if thats the correct term to use here)"

Same goes for search...

twoelfer

Scott,

i'm running visual studio .net 2003 (on an acer travelmate 800).

WM_FYI
thomas woelfer