Whether you are a seasoned programmer or a beginner, chances are you spend a lot of your time looking for code snippets on Stack Overflow and similar sites. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel, after all. Now, a team from Microsoft Research in Cambridge wants to streamline this process and bring it into the IDE. The team today launched the Bing Code Search add-on, which directly integrates code snippet search for C# (with other languages coming later) into Visual Studio.
What’s important here is that this isn’t just a basic search tool. Instead, you can ask queries using natural language (“how to read files line by line”). The tool’s language processing and search is powered by Bing, and everything runs on Azure.
The team has indexed snippets from Stack Overflow, MSDN, Dotnetperls and CSharp411. All the snippets in the index were automatically checked to ensure they compile…
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