Since Matt
Ranlett has now harassed me several times
for removing the Google/MSDN macro from my blog, I decided to repost it. I
have added Live Search to the mix this time and I have tested all of the searches
on Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2.
The
background on this was that I was spending a lot of time on Google and MSDN (aren't
we all?) and was going back and forth from Visual Studio to the browser, so I decided
to try and integrate my searches into Visual Studio. The
resultant experience is that you can highlight any text in Visual Studio and press
your assigned keyboard shortcut and receive search results from your favorite search
engines WITHIN the Visual Studio IDE. It
really comes in handy!
In
the code below, I have provided the URLs for searching against Google, Live,
and MSDN. It should be pretty obvious
when you look at the macro what you would need to do to configure any other search
engines. Be sure to uncomment one (and only
one) of the
url
lines in the code when you setup each macro.
For
those not familiar with macros, here are the steps to add a macro in Visual Studio:
1) Go
to Tools
| Macros | Macros IDE
2) Once
in the Macros
IDE,
you can create a new Module or you can just add this to the default “My Macros” module.
3) To
add to My Macros, just right click on it in the Project Explorer and choose Add
| Add New Item. (if
you don’t see the Project
Explorer,
try View
| Project Explorer).
4) When
the Add
New Item Dialog shows
up, select Code File and enter GoogleSearch and click OK.
5) Paste
the Code for GoogleSearch below into this
file and save it.
Make
sure that you uncomment one of the url lines in the code.
6) Click Debug
| Build and
then close the Macros
IDE.
7) Once
back in VS2005, click Tools
| Customize and
click the Keyboard button
at the bottom of the Customize
Dialog.
8) In
the Show
Commands Containing box,
type “macros” and look for an entry that looks like this: “Macros.MyMacros.GoogleSearch.GoogleSearch”. (This
could be different depending on where you created the macro).
9) Once
you have the correct macro selected, go to the Press
Shortcut Keys box
and type whatever keys you want to fire the macro (I used Alt-G for Google, Alt-M
for MSDN, Alt-L for Live).
10) Click
the Assign button
and then OK and
then finally Close back
on the Customize
Dialog.
11)
Highlight any text in the IDE and fire off your shortcut key to test.
12)
Repeat for each search macro you want to setup.
Here
is the final code for the macro:
Imports EnvDTE
Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions
Public Module GoogleSearch
Sub GoogleSearch()
Dim url As String
Dim selectedText As TextSelection
= DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection()
If Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(selectedText.Text) Then
' uncomment
below for Google
'
url = String.Format("www.google.com/search?q={0}",
Regex.Replace(selectedText.Text, "\s{1,}", "+"))
'
uncomment below for MSDN search
' url
= String.Format("http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/Default.aspx?brand=msdn&query={0}",
Regex.Replace(selectedText.Text, "\s{1,}", "+"))
'
uncomment below for Live search
' url
= String.Format("http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q={0}",
Regex.Replace(selectedText.Text, "\s{1,}", "+"))
DTE.ExecuteCommand("View.WebBrowser",
url)
Else
MsgBox("No
text selected.")
End If
End Sub
End Module
