The InfoViewer Assistant is a free utility
that allows you to organize and manage the help ‘titles’ used by
the Microsoft Developer Studio97 and by the MSDN library.
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.