What is it?

Help in Visual Studio is so slow, it is so slow that I am scared to press F1 accidentally. In my opinion MSDN content is pretty good but accessing it should be easier. I usually find myself writing URLs to my browser address bar like this: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Namespace.Class.MethodOrProperty.aspx. This gets me directly to the information that I need, no fluff. For this purpose I have created a .NET 2.0 Windows Forms application, FxLibrarian (name inspired by FxCop), which uses .NET Framework Class Library documentation of MSDN and presents the content with a simple UI.

Screenshot

Download

FxLibrarian 1.0.0.1 (.zip, 30.8 KB, requires .NET Framework 2.0)

How to use

If you are a mouse user more then a keyboard user, you can just navigate using the tree on the left. You can also use the search box on the upper left corner to search for namespaces, classes, methods, etc. Start by typing namespace like system.windows.forms…. As you start typing the namespace the corresponding node will be selected on the tree. You can press Enter key to open the documentation of highlighted node in tree. To expand the highlighted node without using your mouse, you can use Ctrl + Enter key combination. While you are at the search box, you can also use Up and Down arrow keys to highlight other nodes on the tree.

Known Issues/Todo

• Settings dialog missing, there will be a few settings
• Clicking links inside document view do not select appropriate nodes in tree, this may be added
• UI can be converted to TDI for browsing more documents at a time
• Support for custom styling (using CSS) can be added

Contact

Please send me suggestions, bug reports, feature requests, etc. via