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High Performance Help In VS.NET 2008

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Don't know about you, but some days I'm so busy I don't have time to wait while VS.NET spawns dexplore.exe over DCOM and makes bunch of SOAP calls to MSDN to then find the MSDN url to pop context sensitive help for a keyword (yes I debugged it).  Don't get me started about updating help topics please wait 5 minutes.

I don't need more proof VS.NET help thinks Moore's Law is a challenge one should take very seriously.

Hence I wrote this VS.NET macro to speed things up for me.  Assigned keyboard Alt-F1 to fire off this ReallyFastHelp macro below.

Ok, agreed it's a bit primitive, I haven't written any VB.NET code in years, but it get's the job done.  Feel free to spruce it up.  The cool thing is it automagically opens a new tab in IE7 for me each time I shell it, leaving a nice tab for each search.  Now if I can just figure out how to make VS.NET 2008 remember my keyboard shortcuts after I close and re-open it.  Grrrr.

Imports System
Imports EnvDTE
Imports EnvDTE80
Imports EnvDTE90
Imports System.Diagnostics

Public Module Module1
Sub ReallyFastHelp()
Dim selection As String
Dim shellObject As Object
Dim shellUrl As String

        selection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text
If String.IsNullOrEmpty(selection) Then
shellUrl = "https://msdn.microsoft.com"
        Else
selection = Uri.EscapeUriString(selection)
shellUrl = "https://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=" & selection
End If

        Dim psi As ProcessStartInfo
Dim startInfo As New System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo(shellUrl)
startInfo.WindowStyle = System.Diagnostics.ProcessWindowStyle.Maximized

        System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(startInfo)

    End Sub
End Module

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