One of the things that’s annoyed me in the last few versions is that Books Online isn’t smoothly installed for me. I often seem to forget to run through the process, and I’ll find myself on an airplane without being able to check documentation. It’s frustrating and while I’ve muddled through the process, I’ve never documented it.
And I’m not going to. Aaron Bertrand did it for me for SQL Server 2014. I recently ran through this in a VM that didn’t have the docs installed and it worked great. Along with the 2014 documentation, I also added the 2012 documentation at the same time as I’ve been using this demo VM with 2012 for quite some time and I want to be able to check if behaviors I see are different between 2012 and 2014.
It’s a simple process, though a touch time consuming. Don’t do this while you’re waiting for a plane. In fact, I’d recommend that you do this early in the morning, when you can let it run for awhile. In a VM, mine took over 30 minutes to get BOL 2014 and BOL 2012.
When I finished, I could launch the help viewer from 2014 and see both versions of the docs. If I launched the 2012 documentation, I saw thing, this despite seeing both book as “up to date” in the help configuration. I suspect there’s something in the shortcut that would fix this, but ultimately I don’t care. I have BOL installed, and I can just move the 2014 shortcut to the taskbar, since I use it often.
Filed under: Blog Tagged: sql server, syndicated 
