Recent updates to Silverlight meant I had to install the latest Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio. This has had an annoying side affect – when you press F1 in Visual Studio on a keyword that exists in both Silverlight and the .NET framework and you are using local help the Silverlight topic is displayed. If your primary development target is not Silverlight this is a royal PITA and is acknowledged on the Silverlight SDK blog..

In order to fix this right click on the VS2008 icon and run as an administrator.  Choose the Index option from the Help menu. In the search box type “collection manager” – and click on the Help option in the index list. Uncheck the “Microsoft Silverlight 2 SDK Documentation” collection then click Update VSCC. Close the Document Explorer and Visual Studio. You must open Document Explorer from Help/Index within Visual Studio, starting MSDN directly is not enough.

Now try pressing F1 on one of those pesky topics that exist in both .NET and Silverlight (I used the Add method on a Dictionary class) and wait while Document Explorer updates itself, that long slow horrible process. Once complete you should find that you’re back to seeing the .NET help by default and not the Silverlight help.

Of course this means in Silverlight projects you may not get the help you want – but as I tend to stay within the “grown-up” framework this is a better option for me.