The InfoViewer Assistant

There is some information about this utility and a download link below, but for detailed information please refer to the InfoViewer Assistant's homepage.

For information about Microsoft's InfoViewer, see the unofficial InfoViewer Information page.

Some of the issues it addresses.

This utility is intended to address some of the concerns about the InfoViewer help system. In particular:

• When you install the MSDN Library you get two choices: install all titles to your hard drive, or install none and access all of them from the CD's (note that installing all the titles requires 1.3GB, the figure reported by the installer is incorrect).
  This is inconvient if you will only be using a single title or group of titles, eg. the Knowledge Base (200M) or the Visual C++ documention (only 106M including the samples).
  
• When you install new titles and indexes, the files that they replace are often left on your hard drive, inaccessible and unused.
  
• Once you've installed the Library or a product's documentation, there is no way to make changes to your installation or to see what is installed and where (I frequently see usenet postings that suggest users make changes to their registry just to make adjustments to the organization of their InfoViewer titles).

The Program

Please note that the InfoViewer Assistant currently doesn't require any support files or changes to your system, so the download is not an 'install' program - it is just the application executable itself. The program's ReadMe file and an Overview that explains how it works are available from its home page (see the link above).

Requirements:

All that is required is version 5 of the Microsoft InfoViewer, which comes as part of the Visual Studio97 products - except Visual Basic - and with MSDN CD's since April 97.

Download v1.2 Now (285KB, uncompressed)

The InfoViewer Assistant was last updated on April 15, 1998.