Saturday, February 12, 2011

MSDN links in Visual Studio

I'm looking for a plugin or way to simply go from any namespace, type, method, property, etc in my .Net code to the MSDN page that covers it via a context menu item or hyperlink-like mechanism. Does anyone know of anything that will do that?

The "Go to Definition" option when you right click almost covers this, but it doesn't quite work well enough - no support for namespaces and you often end up at an ugly metadata page. I'm still on vs2005, so if vs2008 is better at this I'd like to know about it.

  • Have you tried F1. This will automatically open the help to the appropriate method or object. Not sure if this works for namespaces.

    stephbu : F1 uses current cursor context to try to find pages - MMV (depending on what's highlighted) but usually it's pretty good.
    Joel Coehoorn : That's probably good enough. I would have preferred something using a Right-click action, but this will do.
    qntmfred : is there a way to have this open MSDN help in the browser rather than Visual Studio's integrated help viewer
    From Matt Brown
  • Besides using F1 (which doesn't always work) I haven't found an add-in for VS to do this, I have another quick way around it.

    I use Launchy (from launchy.net) and setup the Weby plug-in so I can quickly do MSDN searches. So if I'm looking for String.Format, my keyboard only sequence (from VS, or anywhere else) would be this:

    alt-space MSDN String.Format

    that brings me right to an MSDN search, where usually the first listing is what I'm looking for. It's not a perfect solution, but having a fast internet connection and the keyboard only approach works well for me.

0 comments:

Post a Comment