download windows API reference (MSDN) for offline use [closed]

Answer 1

Package This! is a good tool to download and compile MSDN docs as CHM.

Answer 2

In Visual Studio, "Help > Manage Help Settings" you can download the contents to disk. Then you can press F1 to view them.

This feature is even available in Visual Studio Express. You can start the help server manually at %PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft Help Viewer\v1.0

Installing the Windows SDK and the .NET 4 help contents took ~700MB for me. There's probably no way around it.

(Windows SDKs used to contain the documentation but it seems like they've stripped it out in v7.1)

You can even do a search offline in the Help, though from my experience the relevant rate is worse than Google.

Edit: The "Microsoft Help System" is also available in the SDK so you don't need to install Visual Studio to use it

Answer 3

Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015 Help Downloader

Tool for downloading the Visual Studio 2012/2013/2015 help packages for offline use

Answer 4

Just the Win32 API, but it's a thing of beauty: Win32.chm

Although it is now 17 years old, the Win32.hlp file from Microsoft is still a useful reference for those, like me, still programming using the "flat" Windows API. It still covers 99% of what I need and is much more convenient and faster to use than the current MSDN and Windows SDK documentation because it is much smaller. It is a file that is possible to add to the help menu of your IDE or favorite editor and call up instantly, even offline.

Answer 5

Official VS2012Documentation.iso & VS2013Documentation.iso

Official MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 ISO

Answer 6

Here's a blog post explaining how you could install it. You can also only take a subset of it. You can also download the library it from here.