MSDN links in Visual Studio

Question

I'm looking for a plugin or way to simply go from any namespace, type, method, property, etc in my .Net code to the MSDN page that covers it via a context menu item or hyperlink-like mechanism. Does anyone know of anything that will do that?

The "Go to Definition" option when you right click almost covers this, but it doesn't quite work well enough - no support for namespaces and you often end up at an ugly metadata page. I'm still on vs2005, so if vs2008 is better at this I'd like to know about it.

Answer 1

Have you tried F1. This will automatically open the help to the appropriate method or object. Not sure if this works for namespaces.

Answer 2

Besides using F1 (which doesn't always work) I haven't found an add-in for VS to do this, I have another quick way around it.

I use Launchy (from launchy.net) and setup the Weby plug-in so I can quickly do MSDN searches. So if I'm looking for String.Format, my keyboard only sequence (from VS, or anywhere else) would be this:

alt-space MSDN String.Format

that brings me right to an MSDN search, where usually the first listing is what I'm looking for. It's not a perfect solution, but having a fast internet connection and the keyboard only approach works well for me.