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Hack 60. Search the Internet from Visual Studio

Visual Studio's help searches
can extend well beyond the boundaries of the IDE and your hard drive.
Learn how to make it consult online sources of wisdom.

The

Internet has become an
indispensable tool when researching programming tasks. If you have
ever tried programming on a disconnected machine, you will quickly
realize how frustrating it can be when valuable tools like MSDN
Online and Google are not available. The Visual Studio team has
released a power toy called VSOnlineSearch that allows you to search
the Internet from directly inside the text editor, passing whatever
text you have selected to the search engine of your choice.

The first step to using this power toy is to download the tool from
http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/ide
and then install the tool using either the .msi
or .exe file included in the
.zip file. Once you have installed the add-in,
you will find a new menu available when you right-click in the
editor, which is shown in Figure 7-11.

Figure 7-11. VSOnlineSearch right-click menu

To use this power toy, you should first select a piece of text in the
text editor and then right-click and select the search engine you
would like to search. The power toy will then pass the selected text
to the search engine you chose and open the page in the built-in
browser, as shown in Figure 7-12.

Figure 7-12. VSOnlineSearch results

Because the source is also available online (follow the same link as
before), you could add your own searches to the menu if you were so
inclined. (I would love to see a Google groups search item.) The
VSOnlineSearch power toy is simple to install, easy to use, and makes
it very easy to search for something without leaving the IDE.