Using Windows Desktop Search in Visual Studio

This article describes the following:

• Create a Visual Studio add-in

• Create Add-ins tool window

• Use Windows Desktop search for development

This article covers the following technologies:

Visual Studio 2005 and Windows Desktop Search SDK

Code Download location:

Wds2006_07.exe (255KB):

Http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/2/7/f279e71e-efb0-4155-873d-5554a0608523/WDS2006_07.exe

Your computer's hard disk capacity is increasing, and the amount of information you keep is increasing. You have thousands of files and e-mail messages, so it's hard to find exactly the information you need. Thankfully, Windows® Desktop Search can help you find it.

Windows Desktop Search is simple. It allows you to index all your documents, files, and e-mail messages, and any other data that is provided to it, through an extensibility mechanism. As new projects are added and changes to existing items are modified, they are indexed again. You can search for strings and keywords in indexed projects through the UI, and use the associated application to open any found items.

Windows Desktop Search provides an SDK that allows other applications to use its index and search capabilities. As a developer, I spent a lot of time microsoft®visual studio® and also spent a lot of time searching the source code for information related to the task at hand. For example, I will search for an e-mail session that was previously written with a special class or with a coworker for use with a collection. By writing a Visual studio add-in that communicates with Windows Desktop Search, you can build a tool window similar to dynamic Help that uses desktop Search to display related search results for the currently active text in Visual studio. In this article, I'll show you how to create this add-in. Please download the code for this issue for easy reference.

This project shows two technologies: Creating a Visual Studio 2005 add-in with an extensibility interface, and integrating add-ons into Windows Desktop search.

Visual Studio Add-ins provide data to the user in a modeless manner, typically consisting of a tool window, at least one menu command, an Options dialog box that provides a configuration selection, and an About dialog box. I want the Add-in tool window to include Windows Desktop search location filters, such as all, files, and e-mail. I want the add-in to be automatically queried based on the text selected in the Visual Studio editor (see Figure 1), and you can also include an option to turn off this automatic refresh feature. I want the query results to be displayed in the list view, and you can open them with the associated application when the user double-clicks the results. Finally, I want to be able to provide configuration functionality through the Options dialog box. First, we create the add-in and move it to Windows Desktop Search integration.

Figure 1 Search based on selected text