Is there anything smart and helpful, that makes you able to search through the Microsoft .Net documentations (in Visual Studio 2008))? Before you mention Google: before you can search through that stuff with Google you have to know what you’re searching for.
Let’s say you don’t know exactly what to look for and you insert ‘.Net C# String operations’… well… ;).
What I’m looking for is some small beginner-friendly stuff, just essentials. Not the huge thing for the professionals, because I think MS targets these people. And just those.
Thanks, fnush
I find it helpful to launch the offline MSDN library separately rather than have it appear within Visual Studio. This makes it easier to browse at a decent size without interfering with your actual coding window – and often I’ll look up documentation without having Visual Studio open at all.
I usually use the Index pane on the left – then if I need to know about what’s in a particular namespace or type, I can just start typing the name. Of course, that only works if you know which namespace to look for: so I would thoroughly recommend taking half an hour to just browse the most important namespaces to get a feeling for them. In particular, have an idea of what’s in:
You don’t need to really learn anything there by rote – just try to get the gist of what’s where, so you know where to look later.
I also find that when searching the web, including
site:msdn.microsoft.comhelps a lot. Of course there’s plenty of great non-MSDN content too, but it’s nice to be able to filter it sometimes.