Online vs. Offline documentation

I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but vbforums is so good, I'm sure we'll get some good answers... better than by trying to get sense out of Microsoft.
I'm looking at buying Vis. Studio 2008, but reading the product information does it state for the Standard edition, that the documentation is "online", while for the Professional edition is it "online" and "offline".
Does anybody know what this means, and whether in fact if I buy the Standard edition, I'll get the documentation with the product on a CD or will I have to download it .... being "online"?
Any answers will be appreciated

Moved to General Developer

I've never had a standard version, but the professional version comes with a documentation DVD which installs a local copy of MSDN Library on the machine. The good thing about this is you can get very fast search result, and you don't need to have an internet connection to use the library. And I think that's what they mean... With the standard version, you have to use their online MDSN Library, which can be very slow, and you also need internet connectivity to use it.

Yes and yes. Offline is the local content you can install from the included MSDN DVD otherwise its the same or close to the same stuff located online at msdn.microsoft.com. Offline is faster but takes up a couple of GBs of space and online takes no space but requires an internet conn.

Its more of a personal preference but I always like to have the option of local content.

MSDN will be included with different versions depending upon the year version of VS you are wishing to purchase.

2005 - MSDN comes with Standard and above.
2008 - MSDN comes with Pro and above.


Express - only comes wth a small carefully selected Express features only version of MSDN (abot 10MBs wheras full MSDN is a few GBs in size)