Online Help and the MSDN Library

Visual Studio 2015 ships with the MSDN Library, which is where you can find documentation for Visual Basic 2015 and the .NET Framework 4.6. There are basically two ways to access the MSDN Library: offline and online. To access the MSDN Library offline, you have the following alternatives:

Select Help, View Help in Visual Studio.

Press F1 from wherever you are in Visual Studio.

If you are writing code or performing a particular task on a tool within the IDE, pressing F1 is the best choice because you will be redirected to the help page related to the instruction, code statement, or tool you’re dealing with. If you are instead searching for information about a particular technology or framework, such as WPF or the Office Developer Tools, you could consider the other choice. To access the MSDN Library online, you need an Internet connection, and you need to specify to always use the online help by selecting Help, Set Help Preference and then clicking Launch in Browser or Launch Help Viewer. Alternatively, you can manually open one of the following websites, which are the main points of interest for a Visual Basic developer:

The MSDN Library portal at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx

The .NET Framework reference at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w0x726c2(VS.110).aspx

The Visual Basic page on the Visual Studio Developer Center at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh388573

You can also quickly find information on particular objects by using built-in tools such as the Object Browser.