F1 to the Help Rescue - aka How to make the VS F1 key do what you end up doing anyway...

“Hello World” - The SlickEdit Developer Blog - Help With MSDN Help

"F1… it’s possibly the most feared key on my keyboard when writing code in Visual Studio. At best, it’s going to bring up MSDN help, aka dexplore.exe. That means that I’m in for a very, very long wait. ...

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I could understand if dexplore were processing SETI data on startup, crunching genome data, or possibly computing sophisticated weather patterns. But let’s be honest, it’s a glorified web browser. ...

Apparently, I’m not the only one that completely hates the help system. AprilR reports in her blog that Microsoft is overhauling MSDN help based on user feedback. That’s great, but ...

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I set up my own help launcher macro to spawn a web browser, take the selected text and do a Google search on MSDN and the selected text.

Here’s the macro:

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Now, if you go into Tools > Options and select Environment / Keyboard, you can bind Macros.MyMacros.HelpModule.LaunchWebBrowser to the F1 key (or whatever you like). Now, when you press F1, it will go right to Google and search for “MSDN [selection]” where [selection] is any selected text in your active document ..."

Nice. A VS macro to help us do what we do already anyway... Search the web for help.

Like Scott, I'm glad MS has finally heard our cries about MSDN Help, and I really hope we don't have to wait until the next VS version to get the revamp. But until then, this macro may come in handy.

BTW, personally I think I'm going to first try www.searchdotnet.com as my F1 web search source... It's a much more .Net focused search portal put together by Dan Appleman. The search query is a tiny bit harder to code to, but probably well worth it.