VisualStudioExtensibility.com is a great website that contains a lot information on writing extensions for Microsoft's Visual Studio. Unfortunately it isn't very easy to get a quick overview of all the articles (490+ at the time of this writing).
ScrapeVSXCom is a command line program written in F# that scrapes
VisualStudioExtensibility.com and generates a
tab-separated-values,
file where each article line contains:
- Category
- Post date
- Title
- Type (HowTo, Bug, or Other)
- URL
- CategoryURL
This file can then be imported into Microsoft Excel, Google Sheet, etc. and the articles filtered/sorted via any column.
This repo contains ScrapeVSXCom.csv and ScrapeVSXCom.xlsx files if you want to see an example of the generated scraped data.
To use, open ScrapeVSXCom.sln in Visual Studio 2013 and Build. Then open
a Command Prompt window and navigate to the ScrapeVSXCom project
sub-folder. Enter the following command:
bin\Release\ScrapeVSXCom.exe
or
bin\Debug\ScrapeVSXCom.exe
Various informational messages will be printed in the Command Prompt window to show the progress of the program.
Two files are also generated:
-
ScrapeVSXCom.logcontains everything printed to the console, summary information on the articles (Category, Year, and Type), and all the articles listed by Category, Type, Month, and Title. -
ScrapeVSXCom.csvis the tab-separated-values file discussed above.
These two files are versioned so if you run the program multiple times an
existing ScrapeVSXCom.log will be renamed to ScrapeVSXCom.1.log,
ScrapeVSXCom.1.log to ScrapeVSXCom.2.log, etc up to
ScrapeVSXCom.10.log.
ScrapeVSXCom stores the downloaded pages in
<SolutionDir>\ScrapeVSXCom\cache. If you re-run the program it will read
from the local cache instead of downloading from
VisualStudioExtensibility.com again. To avoid this behavior you can simply
delete the entire cache directory or just
<SolutionDir>\ScrapeVSXCom\cache\www.visualstudioextensibility.com\index.html
and the months you want to re-download (Usually the current month is
enough).