Microsoft Help Viewer

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Microsoft Help Viewer (HV) is the offline help system (local help) developed by Microsoft that ships with versions of Microsoft Windows including and subsequent to Windows 8, as well as Visual Studio 2010 and its associated MSDN Library.

Microsoft Help Viewer 1.x supersedes Microsoft Help 2 which is the help system used by Microsoft Visual Studio 2002/2003/2005/2008 and Office 2007. It is shipped with VS 2010. Microsoft Help Viewer 2.x is backwards-compatible with 1.x and is shipped with the operating system as well as VS 2012+.

Although Microsoft Help Viewer was referred to as MS Help 3.x during development, it is a wholly new product and technically unrelated to Microsoft Help 2. With the growing need for a general Unicode-based help system, has become the default help system for Windows 10.