The new plug in from Microsoft that helps developers find code snippets and samples is available for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013. It has been created by combining two existing Visual Studio extensions - Sample Browser and Bing Code Search.

According to the announcement on the Bing dev center team blog,

“the improved feature was developed after listening to customer feedback that a more efficient in-product search experience would allow them to not only find sample codes quickly while in Visual Studio, but would also have the capability to pull in relevant sample codes related to the developer projects themselves while coding, and include offline search.”

The plugin has improvements over the original extensions. The main improvement is the way it works with VS IntelliSense. If you’re coding and there’s a code snippet that’s relevant and related to your current API, it will be automatically displayed in the IntelliSense window which is powered by Bing Code Search. If it’s interesting, you can copy the code into your project, click through to the original source page, or select Search More” to find more code samples related to the API. This feature is currently limited to C#, but other language support will be added in the future.

Another enhancement is to the Code Sample browser. If you enter a search term on the Visual Studio toolbar, you will get both code snippets and code sample projects. Code sample projects are complete Visual Studio demo solutions that you can download, build and run.

The final improvement over the original extensions is the ability to carry out offline searches. You can now search for code samples among your local or downloaded sample projects even when you are disconnected from the Internet.

The developer team blog post says the team has an ambitious roadmap for Bing Developer Assistant for Visual Studio. In addition to the work on supporting more programming languages in the Visual Studio IntelliSense window, plans include expansion of the tool into other developer experiences within the company; enterprise code search, compile / debug error assistance, and MSDN forum support.

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