Building Bing Developer Assistant

Abstract

Software developers heavily rely on code snippets and API usage examples searched on the Internet. This paper presents Bing Code Search, a Visual Studio extension that allows developers to write, within an IDE, free-form natural language questions, and get C # code snippets answering those questions. Bing Code Search automati-cally adapts the suggested snippets into the user’s programming context via variable renaming, and records users ’ interactions to improve its suggestions. Compared to prior related research, Bing Code Search provides a complete automation of the full search-paste-adapt process. Three weeks after we released this free extension, more than 20,000 users downloaded it; and they issue on average 3,000 queries per day.