We've been using a project blog for some time now. It's a standard blog (DasBlog) that everyone in the project gets access to and can write anything related to the project on, such as design choices, new features, new utility classes etc. It works great and its more or less like a bucket of information, anything gets stored in it. It's better to write something that's never gets read than it's not written to the blog and somebody should have read it.
With all this information on the blog, there's a need to sort, search and browse through the posts. We tried to tag every post, so it would be easier to find it later. We even started to tag certain posts with the classname, methodname and/or namespace. For example we have a class ListUtility which contains one method IsNullOrEmpty(IEnumerable list) which does exactly the same as string.IsNullOrEmpty(string str) but works on a list instead of a string. When we posted it to the blog we tagged it with ListUtility and IsNullOrEmpty. This enabled us to later just click either tag in the tag cloud to find posts related to the class and/or method.
Since it seemed to be working great, to tag everything with meaningful tags, we started to think if we couldn't take things further and integrate the blog with Visual Studio. There's always some resistance to move out of Visual Studio, open up your favourite web browser, go to the blog and search for the tag you're looking for. Instead we wanted to be able to right-click a keyword in the code and just press "BlogView" and it would automatically open up a browser in visual studio and search the blog for the highlighted word, which would be treated as a tag in the blog.
Settings
BlogView works with any blog as long as it is possible to search for tags. The Tools menu in Visual Studio contains BlogView Settings where it's possible to change the URL of the blog and how to search for tags. For example, when using DasBlog my URL looks like this http://www.crankingoutcode.com/CategoryView,category,{0}.aspx. Where {0} will get replaced by the current word when right-clicking in Visual Studio code view.
Usage
In Visual Studio code view you can right-click any word such as class, method, object, namespace etc. The current word will be submitted to the search engine of your blog. It is also possible to make a selection and right-click it to submit the whole selection to the blog. For example if you want to submit a complete namespace which contains dots. Otherwise it will only submit the word and break on any dot.
Download
Download BlogView 1.0.1 (Visual Studio 2005/2008) (released 2008-10-19)
Be the first to rate this post
- Currently 0/5 Stars.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5