Bing developer assistant: improving developer productivity by recommending sample code

Abstract

In programming practice, developers often need sample code in order to learn how to solve a programming-related problem. For example, how to reuse an Application Programming Interface (API) of a large-scale software library and how to implement a certain functionality. We believe that previously written code can help developers understand how others addressed the similar problems and can help them write new programs. We develop a tool called Bing Developer Assistant (BDA), which improves developer productivity by recommending sample code mined from public software repositories (such as GitHub) and web pages (such as Stack Overflow). BDA can automatically mine code snippets that implement an API or answer a code search query. It has been implemented as a free-downloadable extension of Microsoft Visual Studio and has received more than 670K downloads since its initial release in December 2014. BDA is publicly available at: http://aka.ms/devassistant.