Out of curiosity: what happens if you instruct Visual Studio 2012’s Help Manager to update your content, and then put your computer to sleep?

Part of the developer/software engineer spirit is to (sometimes) try unconventional methods in solving problems and/or finding new information. I'm a fan of locally installed help content (works in planes and trains without being online), and when I install Visual Studio 2012 onto a machine, I most often use the Help Manager to choose the local topics I want, and then let the tool get the content from the web for me.

Now, I wanted to check if the Help Manager can handle situations where the network connection goes down, so I decided to put my computer to sleep, and then resume it. Turns out Help Manager didn't like it, as the following error message popped up:

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Microsoft Help Viewer 2.0
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The following errors occurred while performing the requested tasks: An error
occurred while updating content: An error occurred while the BITS service was
transferring http://packages.mtps.microsoft.com/v2visual_studio_2011_net_
framework_45_b916_vs_110_en-us_8(01a1b801-91da-177a-e31c-2ae1dae90a70).cab to
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary2\Catalogs\VisualStudio11\
Incoming\Cab\v2visual_studio_2011_net_framework_45_b916_
vs_110_en-us_8(01a1b801-91da-177a-e31c-2ae1dae90a70).cab.

Error context: RemoteFile
Error code: 0x80200010
BITS message: There are currently no active network connections. Background
Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) will try again when an adapter is connected.
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OK   
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The good thing is that I learned something new: the Help Manager uses BITS transfer behind the scenes, which in turn is a good thing: it will allow higher priority downloads to complete first, and won't hog all your Internet connection capacity (important on slow connections). Also, we can learn that the web address that content is being fetched from is http://packages.mtps.microsoft.com/.

But, recovering from sleep mode is something that could be improved. Maybe in the next version. :-)

Happy hacking!