Bring Windows Desktop Search Into Visual Studio With Our Cool Add-In

摘要

As computer hard drives get larger, so does the amount of information you hold onto. You end up with thousands of files and e-mail messages to plow through to find just the information you need. Thankfully, Windows~® Desktop Search can help. Windows Desktop Search is very straightforward. It indexes all of your documents, files, and e-mail messages, and any other data provided to it through extensibility mechanisms. As new items are added and changes are made to existing items, they're reindexed. The UI lets you search for strings and keywords in indexed items and open any found item with the associated app. Windows Desktop Search provides an SDK that allows for its indexes and searching functionality to be consumed by other applications. As a developer, I spend a lot of time in Microsoft~® Visual Studio~®, and I spend a lot of time hunting around in my source code for material relevant to my development task at hand. For example, I'll search for other code snippets I previously authored using a particular class or e-mail conversations I had with a colleague concerning a certain collection's usage. By writing an add-in for Visual Studio that communicates with Windows Desktop Search, it's possible to construct a Dynamic Help-like tool window that uses Desktop Search to show relevant search results for the currently active text in Visual Studio. In this article, I'll show you how to build such an add-in. Download the code for this issue so you can follow along.