Announcing msdnman

When Kim, Tim, and I were working on MSDN2 - or more accurately, the Microsoft/Technet Publishing System (MTPS), the system behind MSDN2 - way back when, we always had in mind that it was important to create a system where the content could be leveraged in ways other than to power the MSDN2 website. And we did - every time you hit F1 in Visual Studio 2005, you're accessing the MTPS system. Now that the MTPS Content Service is publicly available, we expect other applications of the data to start popping up.

 

To get the ball rolling, and because we always thought it would be cool, I've written the first one. I call it msdnman, and users of *nix systems should find it fairly familiar: it's written as an analog of the man command. The idea is to provide command-line access to the MTPS content. I'm a big command-line guy myself, so I really like the concept.

 

For now, I've posted the binaries and source here. I'm working on getting it shoved over to SourceForge, but there are a few administrative hurdles to clear first, so it might take me a few weeks.

 

Because I wrote this in my spare time over a couple of days, it's still a bit rough. But it's still pretty servicable for those times where you don't want to fire up a browser, and I think it makes a reasonable demonstration of how to use the web service, too.

 

It's pretty straightfoward to use. Simply grab the binaries and run something like

 

msdnman System.Xml.XmlReader

 

in a console window, and you should see something like this:

 

 

There are a bunch of options that you can specify, too. You can get a list of them by running

 

msdnman -?

 

but briefly, you'll generally either do this:

 

msdnman IDENTIFIER

 

or this

 

msdnman -k KEYWORD

 

where IDENTIFIER identifies some content item in the MTPS system. See here for more information, but usually this will be the name of the namespace, class, method you're looking up, like System.Xml.XmlReader or System.Security.Cryptography.

 

The "-k" option is a nifty little add-on that I did (at the request of John Mollman - this is your blog, right?), which does a keyword search against the MSDN content. So you can do

 

msdnman -k web.config

 

to get back a list of links having something to do with web.config.

 

I implemented the search part by wiring up to the same web service that Visual Studio 2005 uses, as the MTPS web service does not currently support search.

 

So download and enjoy, and let me know if you have any ideas for how to improve it.