Legacy Update: Get back online, activate, and install updates on your legacy Windows PC

Visual Studio is a family of products, tools, and technologies that you can use to build powerful, high-performance apps, including Windows Store, desktop, web, phone, and game-console apps. You can write code in Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual F#, and JavaScript, and create mixed-language solutions. And you can simplify the development of your apps by using the .NET Framework.

The Visual Studio and .NET Framework documentation is provided in the following formats:

• Online, in the MSDN Library (this is the most up-to-date content)
• Visual Studio documentation
• .NET Framework documentation
• Offline, through downloadable books (available from the Visual Studio Help menu)
• (This download) As a self-extracting EXE package. The package is provided for firewall and proxy restricted environments. If you want to download the documentation for local use on a single computer, choose the online or offline option above

This download doesn’t include updates to the documentation that were made after product release. See the online documentation for the latest information.

Files

Status: Deleted This download is no longer available on microsoft.com. The downloads below are archives provided by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine from the Microsoft Download Center prior to April 2023.

Files
VS2015Documentation.exe

File sizes and hashes are retrieved from the Wayback Machine’s indexes. They may not match the latest versions of files hosted on Microsoft servers.

There are no system requirements to download these components. However, to install and view the product documentation, Microsoft Help Viewer components must be installed.

Instructions for getting Visual Studio and .NET Framework documentation into secured environments:

1. Click the Download button on this page to start the download.
2. Click Save to save the download to a USB drive or other portable media that can be carried into the firewalled environment.
3. Double-click the self-extracting EXE to unpack the contents.
4. Specify a location of your choice to extract the contents to. For example, a network share that is accessible to your destination server.
5. Set Help Preference in Visual Studio by launching Visual Studio, clicking the HELP menu, then selecting Set Help Preference, and then clicking Launch in Help Viewer.
6. Luanch Help Viewer by clicking the HELP menu, then clicking View Help (or pressing Ctrl+F1), or by clicking the HELP menu, then clicking Add and Remove Help Content (or pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1).
7. In Help Viewer, select the Manage Content tab.
8. Under Installation source, select Disk and browse to the directory where you unpacked the downloaded EXE.
9. Select the HelpContentSetup.msha file and click Open.
10. Click Add next to the documentation you want to install.
11. Click Update.
12. Exit Help Library Manager once the update finishes.