VS11 Help Viewer 2 beta no longer works after update. by Tobias Käs

I have experienced this very same issue with Visual Studio 2012 RTM, when installing Update 1 on it.

I solved the problem by copying a little file CatalogType.xml from another installation (without update) to /ProgramData/Microsoft/HelpLibrary2/Catalogs/VisualStudio11/
The content of this file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><catalogType>UserManaged</catalogType>

Thank you for reporting this issue you've encountered with Visual Studio RC Update. We were able to reproduce this issue and have confirmed that it is a problem. We are currently weighing this issue with where we are at in the product lifecycle, implications of the change, workarounds, and related things. We currently plan to fix this issue for a future release of the product.

Thanks

In the meantime, we recommend the following workarounds to address your issue:

1) Do a repair on Visual Studio to have it lay down the expected files. This will unfortunately put you in a situation where your old store is not being used and you will need to re-install the books. Additionally you will probably want to delete the folder that had the old content store since it is just using disk space.

2) You can manually update the registry key for content store location to point your moved folder. We have documented our registry keys at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh500508(v=vs.110) the one you would want to look at is LocationPath. I would only advise this solution if you are comfortable updating the registry.

@Smart Gotodo - sorry didn't get notified of your post so I didn't notice it. I added an explanation how to work around it on that other tab.

@Microsoft - this is silly, you marked this as solved and the first patch for VS 2012 RC has the exact same problem (it was published AFTER this has been marked as solved).

hi Tobias Käs,
can you show how to fix it manually in detail?

thanks,

Just to clarify, I didn't try to uninstall/reinstall anything. It was a VisualStudio patch which broke the registry setting: it had reset the local help store path even though I had previously moved it. I fixed this for myself by manually adjusting the registry setting, but you may want to be more careful about your patches in the future.

Tobias,

There is an additional change to the book definitions which require uninstall of Beta content for upgrades. We did cover this in the Beta Help Viewer 2.0 Readme which unfortunately is not very discoverable. We are working on addressing the Readme discoverability issue.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=237571

2.1.2. Remove Visual Studio 11 Beta Help content books before you uninstall Visual Studio 11 Beta
When Visual Studio 11 Beta is uninstalled, Microsoft Help Viewer is also uninstalled. However, the Help content books are not removed.

To resolve this issue:

Before you uninstall Visual Studio 11 Beta, on the Visual Studio menu bar, choose Help, Add or Remove Local Help Content, and then remove the Visual Studio 11 Beta Help books.

Malcolm Dickson
Help Viewer Program Manager

Thank you for submitting feedback on Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework. Your issue has been routed to the appropriate VS development team for review. We will contact you if we require any additional information.

From what I can see the registry settings have indeed been reset, none of the paths in the registry point to my actual content storage.

@Mike Danes - yes I've changed the local help store to point to another drive during the initial installation, I'll check the registry settings later today and post the results.

Thank you for your feedback, we are currently reviewing the issue you have submitted. If this issue is urgent, please contact support directly(http://support.microsoft.com)

Did you change the local help store path? I did and after installing the update I got the same error as you. I found that the path (stored in registry) had reverted to the original path and of course, there are no files there...