installing Help viewer without installing visual studio

Question

I want to take some of MSDN help files offline on a windows machine which does not have visual studio installed on it. the problem is that I cannot find a way to get and install Help Library manager and Help viewer without installing the visual studio or sql server. How can I install them without installing the visual studio or sql server?

Answer 1

I just wrote an answer on how to do this for an older question, which can be found here.

For convenience, here are the essential steps to get Help Viewer 2.2 to run without going to the trouble of installing a complete copy of Visual Studio 2015:

• Most of the files required by HlpViewer.exe can be found on the Visual Studio DVD in two different MSI packages. By passing some additional command line arguments to msiexec, it's quite easy to install them manually:
  msiexec.exe /i help3_vs_net.msi VS_SETUP=1
msiexec.exe /i vs_minshellcore.msi MSIFASTINSTALL="7" VSEXTUI="1"

While this installs most necessary files, it doesn't account for all of them ... to keep things simple, I copied the rest of them from a working installation on another computer:

• C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary2
  Essentially only contains a CatalogType.xml and some empty directories.
• C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Help Viewer\v2.2\CatalogInfo\VS11_en-us.cab

Moreover, it's necessary to provide the application with a valid ContentStore path by importing the following .reg file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Help\v2.2\Catalogs\VisualStudio14]
"LocationPath"="%ProgramData%\\Microsoft\\HelpLibrary2\\Catalogs\\VisualStudio14\\"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Help\v2.2\Catalogs\VisualStudio14\en-US]
"SeedFilePath"="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Help Viewer\\v2.2\\CatalogInfo\\VS11_en-us.cab"
"catalogName"="Visual Studio Documentation"

Finally, I created a new Application Shortcut and changed its Target: to read as follows:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Help Viewer\v2.2\HlpViewer.exe" /catalogName VisualStudio14 /launchingApp Microsoft,VisualStudio,14

Et voilà!, with that HlpViewer.exe should finally execute without any problems!