Quickly lookup MSDN documentation - visual-studio

I often need to look up documentation about classes/methods in the CLR. My usual process is just typing the method/class name into Google. But I would like to be able to right click any method within Visual Studio, and then click "Lookup on MSDN". Is there something already built in for this that I'm missing?
For example, I want to right click "Directory" in System.IO.Directory and then be taken here.
I am on Visual Studio 2010 Pro.

You can install the library locally - this is something that is offered during the Visual Studio installation process.
Re-run the installer and you should be presented with the option to install some of the articles locally (you can choose which items you want).

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Console Application not found on visual studio 2015

I just download visual studio community to my pc. When i opened the vs-2015 and create new Console application project. i can't find it any where under the c# we installed templates or any templates.
Thinking about to uninstall and install again but this not the first time i uninstall and install this, i did installed and uninstall few time but still can't find the web Console Application template.
Thank you.
I had the same problem and found the solution on another site. Here are the steps that need to be performed:
Open a Visual Studio command window with admin privileges. This can be done from Windows search after clicking on the Windows button (or Start button - depending on the OS) located in the lower left corner. Make sure that you don't have any Visual Studio project open before proceeding.
Type in prompt in the search box and select "Developer Command Prompt". Right click on this and select run with admin privileges.
In the command window Enter:
cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE
In the command window then enter:
devenv /installvstemplates
This worked for me and I was able to create a new console project after this.
With my version of VS 2015 community edition, upon install there was a Console Application (Package) template available, which I mistakenly thought was a Console Application template. This is not the case. It is a web console application project and I only discovered this after trying to access the File and Directory classes in System.IO from my code. The compiler kept on complaining:
Error CS0234 The type or namespace name 'Directory' does not exist in the namespace 'System.IO' (are you missing an assembly reference?)
MyProject.DNX Core 5.0 ...
It still complained after putting in a reference to System.IO and even after changing the offending line of code to:
string DataPath = System.IO.Directory.GetCurrentDirectory();
A big clue here is the reference to DNX Core 5.0, which is an optimized run-time for ASP apps. It was at that point that I discovered that the Console Application (Package) template was also listed under the New Project window Templates / Visual C# / Web.
So, For others that may happen to find this post and think you are using a standard Console Application template, but have errors like "CS0234 The type or namespace "name" does not exist in the namespace..." then you could be using a Console Application (Package) template - which is probably not what you want and should be replaced by a regular Console Application. If you don't see it in the New Project window under Templates / Visual C#, then you should follow the steps above to install it.
EDIT
This is what my New Project window looks like after I performed the steps above:
Comparing this window with yours above, it appears to be somewhat different. Notice that "New Project" on my window is centered and for yours it is not. Also, at the bottom of the window yours has only Name, Location and Solution name, while my window adds a fourth item called Solution.
So, first thing, try clicking on Visual C# located in the left pane of your New Project window to see the templates available. Post that snapshot here. This can be done by selecting edit.
If you still don't see the Console Application template, then perhaps you downloaded a different version of Visual Studio 2015 than I did. So, here is the screen that pops up after selecting Help / About Microsoft Visual Studio on my system:
Compare this screen with yours and post a snapshot of your screen here. Also, what operating system are you using?
Thanks again Bob for your time to explained it to me, i am really appreciate that, I uninstalled and installed again from this link enter link description here, On my machine i have Visual Studio 2015(this one works) and Blend for Visual Studio 2015 is still missing template but i don't care it anymore if it work or not because i will use the one that works which is the Visual Studio 2015.

Continue Visual Studio 2015 installation of features

I recently added the required components for creating universal apps for Windows 10 in Visual Studio 2015. However, I didn't have the time to finish the installation. The installation was cancelled successfully and I was met with a message like this: '52 of 58 components was successfully installed.'.
I didn't get any information on how to continue this process. Is there any way of continuing the installation? I've tried looking around in Visual Studio 2015, and I can't find any place to do this. I also tried downloading the emulators again, because that's the one that didn't finish. I then get a message which says I need to uninstall an already installed version of the Windows 10 emulators.
The original installation was triggered through Visual Studio when I tried to choose 'Universal'. It didn't have any of the templates available and said it needed to install the SDK. I was then met with the sweet checkbox GUI (it looks just like this) where I chose what to install.
Is there any way to get back into this GUI, or, are the any way of continuing this installation?
If you download the installer again and run it, there should be a "modify" option I believe. From there you can add features you wish via the checkbox screen you mentioned.
UPDATE: This can be remedied by using "change" within programs and features. From then you can modify the installation to add necessary features. (See comments for more details)

Visual Studio Find All Not Referenced

In Visual Studio is there an automatic way to search over file(s) and find all classes/properties/methods that aren't referenced. Essentially abandoned code.
I don't want to manually have to right click on each and select "Find All References"
This is not a feature of Visual Studio in the current version. Using Roslyn you could code and Inspector yourself, but Roslyn doesn't offer one out of the box either at the moment. The walk-through on Semantic analysis should get you started. The roslyn forum is a good place to seek help or find examples, and there's a well monitored tag on StackOverflow as well of course.
Productivity plugins like Resharper and Code Rush offer this for sure. There are other similar tools that might have this feature JustCode, VisualAssist, CodeItRight are likely candidates.
You can also use something like Visual NDepend to detect unused methods. Their new command Linq to Code features should make it relatively easy to build a commandline tool that fishes out all unused calls.
A bit late but if you install SSDT (Sql Server Data Tools) this also add grayed reference count to each method in visual studio.
Note: This is actually "code lens" which is no longer available for VS2015. Installing the SSDT is the way you can have "code lens" in VS2015.

How to install visual studio documentation offline?

I have suffered trying to download documentation using Visual Studio's Help Library Manager. It just gets stuck after downloading 2 out of 5 books, and there is no option to pause and resume. Does anyone know where I can get full documentation to download and install offline?
you can download latest documentation at :
http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=34794
The answers above are not perfectly clear in how to "install" the help. I had to search a bit to find out how... Hope my answer is helpful to the newbie...
As mentioned by "Prakash GPz", the documentation is already present in the dvd for Visual Studio 2010. If you want to install this after starting use of Visual Studio 2010, you need to do the following steps:
Start Visual Studio 2010
Navigate to the "Help" menu
Click on "Manage Help Settings"
Since help might not be initialized for you, you will have to set the Help3 content location (just accept the default shown)
Select "Install content from disk"
Browse to the "ProductDocumentation" folder under the DVD drive
Select the HelpContentSetup.msha file
Click "Add" on each section of the help (or click "Add for ALL the sections) that you'd like to have locally available.
The installation will take a while, but after everything is done, you'll have local help available!
Installation of offline help has changed (again). For the latest versions of Visual Studio (up to 2017, at the moment), you need to include the Help Viewer during installation, or at it later with the "Modify" option in the Visual Studio Installer.
You can find the "Help Viewer" option under "Code tools", in the "Individual components" tab of the installer.
Once you've enabled the Help Viewer, you can find commands under the Visual Studio "Help" menu to control its behavior: "Add and Remove Help Content" allows you to select what documentation areas will be available offline, while the "Set Help Preference" menu allows you to specify whether to display offline help in a browser window or using the Help Viewer.
Note that changes to the Help Viewer need to be made in an elevated process (i.e. under an admin account). If you usually operate the computer using a non-admin account, you'll need to log in as an admin to update the offline help content, because it requires the running process to be the same user account as the actual logged in account.
You can install the documentation manually from the setup folder itsef. it is availablein 'ProductDocumentation' folder. you have to open a file with .msha extensiom
To install VS docs offline, you can use MSDN to USB, it works with any Visual Studio 2010|2015|2017|2019 IDE product.
Apparently, you've to download the docs 1st, then use this tool to "Backup MSDN" to your USB drive, later use the same tool to "Locate MSDN".

How do I find a complete list of extensions installed in VS2008?

I want that list, because if something horrible happens, and I'll have to reinstall Visual Studio - I'll need this list, so that I can recreate the same development environment. This also makes it hard to search for updates - I can not see the versions of currently installed plug-ins.
So, is there a single place in Visual Studio, that would show me a complete list of plug-ins and their versions?
Help->About Microsoft Visual Studio->Installed Products
If you go to Help->About Visual Studio you typically see a list of extensions.

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