Installing or Accessing VSMT help on a Windows XP machine.

I thought this was worth mentioning after I received an email today with a question about VSMT. I answered the email (hopefully with the correct answer!), but would have been able to give a more complete answer if I had had the VSMT help file to hand. With ADS 1.1, VSMT is bundled in the installer, but you can't install VSMT on XP regardless of which options you choose as it bombs out saying it can only be installed on Windows Server. Lets not go the Orca route on that one though... ;) Unfortunately (apart from a VM which I could have fired up, but was being lazy), I don't have a Windows Server 2003 machine to hand to install VSMT onto itself.

I realised there is a simple solution. Assume the ADS 1.1 installer is in c:\ads, the VSMT_Setup.msi which the ADS installer launches by default will be c:\ads\VSMT. If you perform an administrative install of VSMT by running msiexec /a VSMT_Setup.msi, you get a choice of where to put the network files (eg c:\ads\VSMT\Network).

Once the administrative install completes, if you navigate to c:\ads\VSMT\Network\VM, you can directly launch the VSMT.chm help file. Not rocket science, but hopefully it'll help someone :)

Cheers,
John.