Get your personal coding assistant
As a student, search engines, web forums & technical blogs have always been your best friends to get you all the day-to-day programming related help. But going between Visual Studio and your web browser for your coding questions can be a real hassle. A major part of your time is just spent in formulating the right query with appropriate context like project type, language etc. so that you can resolve code errors or search for projects and code samples. This is always very painful!
Well, we have a solution! Developer Assistant for Visual Studio makes your software development lifecycle a lot simpler. We have created a productivity plugin that brings the combined power of Bing search capabilities and contextual help to resolve your coding problems. With Developer Assistant, you can explore and use over twenty-one million C# code samples and thousands of sample projects from within Visual Studio. Developer Assistant brings the following key features:
API Assistant
When using Developer Assistant, you can upgrade your coding efficiency with Visual Studio IntelliSense. While coding, a relevant code snippet related to your current API will be automatically displayed in the IntelliSense window. You can copy the code, click the source URL to view where the code snippet comes from, or click “Search More” to find more code samples related to the API. Our repository has code samples from major sources like MSDN, GitHub & StackOverflow.
Programming Task Assistant
Programming Task Assistant helps you search for projects and find code snippets for common tasks.
Cntrl+Shift+f1 brings up the “How do I“ search box in your IDE window. You can type in natural, everyday language and Programming Task Assistant will surface multiple code samples for your query. It is a one-stop place for millions of code samples to help you with your programming tasks.
By using the search box at the top, you can now access thousands of .NET Open source projects from GitHub, such as the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”). You can also access complete code sample projects like complete Visual Studio demo solutions from MSDN that you can download, build and run. Searching is easy -- simply enter the queries in everyday language, and we will do the search for you. The results will appear within Visual Studio, and all you’ll have to do is scroll through project results and choose the most relevant ones you want to learn.
Compiler Error Assistant
Today, when you get a compilation error in C# or VB when using VS2013 or older versions, you need to copy/paste the error message in the search and then modify the query so that the context is taken into account. All that is now a thing of the past. Now, when you get a compilation error in your project, don’t panic! Right click on the compiler error and invoke “Bing Contextual Search”. With just a click, the new Compile Error Assistant gathers the error info, all the relevant context (e.g. Project Type = Microsoft Azure), and finds the best potential solutions from the web using the power of contextual Bing search.
In VS2015, our contextual search feature has shipped as default for C# language. With just one click from the compiler error code, Bing will open automatically and search the web using contextual information from your development environment such as the project type, error message, and code.
Clicking on the hyperlinked error code will open a Bing page with everything you need about the compiler error: the error code, message and contextual information of your development environment.
Get your latest version of developer assistant from here. For more details, see our demo video
Our vision is to improve Developer Productivity in the development life cycle by providing personalized and contextual help. Your feedback is crucial to help us achieve this vision. Please write to us at bingdevassistant@microsoft.com for feature requests, to report bugs, or to suggest improvements.
On behalf of teams from Bing, Developer Experience, Microsoft Research & Visual Studio, Thank you.