Where does Visual Studio Help Viewer download the locally installed help content?

Random things sometimes lead to discovery of new information. In this case, I learned where Visual Studio's Help Viewer 2.0 is downloading its content if you instruct it to download a local copy of the help material.

I'm a fan of locally installed content (I work pretty often in locations where an Internet connection isn't available), so I tend to install Visual Studio first, and then proceed to download local help content. Now, I did this just yesterday to a new machine I'm setting up, but since downloading everything takes several hours to complete, my computer had gone to sleep mode while downloading the help packages from Microsoft.

When I resumed the computer from sleep, I received an error message from Help Viewer:

The following errors occurred while performing the requested tasks:
An error occurred while updating content: An error occurred while
the BITS service was transferring [snip].

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.

Of course, resuming the update was straightforward, so this error wasn't by no means a showstopper. However, what was interesting was the URL and file paths shown in the error message. Thus, I learned that the local help content is downloaded from an URL like this:

http://packages.mtps.microsoft.com/

Similarly, the packages are stored in a local path like this:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\HelpLibrary2\Catalogs\VisualStudio12\Incoming\

In case you are having trouble downloading the help content, check that you can access the above URL. You can also check to see what is being downloaded the your local help storage path under C:\ProgramData.

Hope this helps!