Tonight I partially finished a little project I have been working on, it is called DevHelper which probably isn't the best name but whatever. It is meant to quickly answer your questions about .NET programming problems when you have them. Try it out here.

Update: Source available here: http://www.stevenrockarts.com/devhelper.zip

Basically DevHelper searches the blogs of professionals in the industry and searches Microsoft help pages for any query that you might have. This results in a more accurate range of answers. So for example if you wanted to know about data binding or design patterns you would get the most popular answer to that query.

A list of the sites it searches is available here. I am planning on adding the functionality to be able to add your own sites in the future but for now you are stuck with my favorites hehe. I also would like to be able to link to queries, it shouldn't be to hard to add.

DevHelper is built on the MSN Search API using CSS, ASP.NET and C#. The results are a custom control which are dynamically added to a placeholder control. I need to work on the design a bit to make it look more like MSN Search but for now the main functionality is there so I can dogfood it for a bit and then tweak it as I go.

The logo looks like a Google logo because it was easiest to make and I will probably use the Google Search API sometime in the future as well.

The only issue I am having right now is that the MSN Search API as far as I can tell only returns 50 results so you only get the 50 most popular pages for any particular query. It also puts weird blocks around words from your search query that should be highlighted.

If you have any comments or suggestions I would love to hear them. Please leave them in the comments.