Visual Studio can display online help in a webbrowser, as well as offline help via Microsoft Help Viewer.
For quite some time, the offline help files for Windows Desktop App Development are screwed up. For instance, if you enter CreateFile in the index, nothing (or merely related pages) will show up. If you press F1 in Visual Studio, it will usually display the online help variant.
I noticed that I had a machine with an older documentation set that was still working properly. I decided to create a help manifest that you can use to download a working version of Windows Desktop App Development. It is older documentation set from about 2018, and includes help up to Windows 10 version 1709.
- In Microsoft Help Viewer, switch to the Manage Content tab and uninstall broken books, such as Windows Desktop App Development and Programming reference for Windows API.
- Click the Update button to remove the broken books.
- Select the Installation source Disk and enter the following URL: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mgtek/win32_en-us_vs/master/helpcontentsetup.msha
- Select Windows Desktop App Development (2018) and click Add and then Update to install the book.