I've recently thought of adding additional feature to ReSharper: something like "Extended Help" : it would search the Web and some special sites like (MSDN Online, .NET 247, etc.) for information about that exact symbol which is currently selected in the IDE. One thing I would also like to implement there is searching any publicly available code repositories for usages of the symbol. The idea behind that is allowing users to see how the symbol is used by their peers what could help them to detect errors in their code and find useful API usage patterns. Several days ago I found a site which does almost what I said: koders.com. Unfortunately it only performs textual indexing of source code so it's difficult to find occurences of a specific method (or even indexer if we take C#). I also didn't like the results format much. Maybe anyone knows a search engine which also performs resolve on open source repositories and allows searching particular symbols. If not, it's another nice idea to work on in spare time when I get some. I never wrote search engines so it must be a very exciting experience ;)
Posted by Oleg Stepanov at February 9, 2005 01:51 PM | TrackBack