Developer Assistant for Visual Studio is a productivity plugin that brings the combined power of Bing Code Search capabilities and contextual help to day-to-day developer problems, like resolving code errors and searching for projects and code samples. Developer Assistant has taken a big leap with integration of GitHub in the latest version.
GitHub hosts the largest open source community in the world. Many popular Microsoft open source projects like .Net foundation, Node.js, and Bootstrap are already hosted on GitHub. It also hosts API usage samples for popular open source libraries, like HTMLAgilityPack, NewtonSoft.json, Xamarin, and the Windows universal platform.
Today, search engines are not optimized to show code samples from GitHub in search results. Until recently, Developer Assistant was powering code samples in the IntelliSense window only from sources like MSDN and Stack Overflow. With the latest release of Developer Assistant, in which we are now integrated with GitHub, the number of repository of code samples, API samples, and projects that you can search for from within Visual Studio has shot up to 21 million.
By using the search box in Developer Assistant, you can now access thousands of .NET Open source projects from GitHub, such as the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) and core foundational libraries (CoreFX). Searching is easy; simply enter the queries in natural language, and we’ll do the search for you. We’ll present the results within Visual Studio, and all you’ll have to is scroll through project results and choose the most relevant ones you want to learn from or contribute to.
Now, as a developer, it is very easy for you to help the developer community learn about a new program or application. Just contribute your code samples/projects in GitHub or MSDN and Developer Assistant will start prioritizing them in search results.
Our vision is to improve Developer Productivity in the development life cycle by providing personalized & contextual help. Your feedback will help us to 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.
 | Anuj Jain, Program Manager, Bing Tech Experiences @1AJain Anuj has been with Microsoft for 2 years. He is passionate about improving developer productivity by combining the power of web by using Bing & Development Environment to provide contextually aware help to developers. He is currently focused on expanding Developer Assistant to next set of programming languages. |