I was looking for some code samples for developing my 2nd Windows 8 Metro Application, were I landed into an exciting extension from Microsoft which is called “Microsoft All In One Code Sample Browser”. This extensions is available as a free download for both Visual Studio 2010 and also for Visual Studio 2012 IDE’s. Now the question arises here is what will this extension do to the developers. Yes as always Microsoft team do, this extensions makes the developer life easier to search for the online code samples with ease.        [more]

Microsoft Visual Studio Product team and MSDN Gallery team coordinated this effort to get this extension available to the developers with which we can search and download 3500+ code samples easily as per the search criteria. This code sample extension has 700+ ready to use Windows 8 Metro code samples and 1000+ All in one code samples with an integrated search and download.

What are the benefits?

It has a rich set of features that makes the integration of Search capability to search for the keywords which gets a list of available code samples for this keyword. It has an integrated feature where can download the code sample right into the local desktop and use it across the project.

Where to download?

This extensions is available as a free download which can be downloaded from the MSDN Visual Studio Gallery website. This extension can be installed directly on to Visual Studio 2010 and also the Visual Studio 2012 Integrated Development Environment in a single installation. Download the extension from the link Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension

How to use this Extension?

Once the extension is downloaded and installed we can see a search option available on to the tool box that is available in the Visual Studio IDE at the top ribbon menu as shown in the screen below.

This is the search engine which is going to play a vital role in fetching out the much related code samples for the search criteria which we are going search. Just enter the required sample name and we can see a window which fetches the samples as shown in the screen below.

Now if we can select the much related code sample and we can see the complete details about the sample and the details of the download link with the author as shown in the screen below.

By clicking on download we can see the code sample will be started downloading and the sample will be available locally for easy accessing to the application as shown in the screens below.

Once the application code sample is downloaded locally we can see the status as Open as shown in the screen below. Now click on it to open the code sample which will launch a new Visual Studio IDE instance and opens the code sample as shown in the screen below.

This makes most of the developers work easy to search for a code sample and download it to local. Microsoft VS product team and MSDN Code Gallery team made this wonderful extension which makes easier to search and download. Again we can see much more enhanced features with this browser is we can see the documentation of the code sample that can be viewed with this extension itself by simply clicking on Documentation option as shown in the screen below.

Now if we want to search for a particular technology or environment, here an option is provided to search for the same by selecting the product in the initial screen itself. We can select from the list of options available and provide the search string as shown in the screen below.

Once we select the product and search for the code sample it fetches the sample based on the search criteria as shown in the screen below.

One more feature which will be very useful to have it handy is the favorites which makes it still easier for the developers to access the code samples easily. If in scenarios we search for a lot of code sample and need to have handy a few of them we can add those samples to favorites with a single button click. Just select the sample and right click on it and we can see an option “Add to Favorite” as shown in the screen below.

Now we can see the code sample listed in the favorites section as shown in the screen below. which can be accessed anytime and download it readily with ease.

Apart from all these features we can see an important tip feature available in the coding section will be, readily from the code we can search the code sample by simple right click and we can see the Search code sample option available as shown in the screen below.

We can see the extension will open some code sample that uses the Storagefolder class in the sample project as shown in the screen below.

Finally a much needed feature, if we don’t see any particular code sample that is been available in the Microsoft Code Gallery we can request for one by click on the Sample Request Service and submit a request as shown in the screen below.

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