Software: MSDN search tip

I really don’t like using Microsoft’s search engine to search MSDN. I can’t ever seem to find what I’m looking for because the search engine always seems to return everything but what I want. This is particularly a problem when I’m searching on something from a programming language reference or library. Usually I’ll use Google to search the site, but today I made an interesting discovery that may end up making MSDN more useful to me.

I wanted to find out what [Serializable] is in its relationship to a class. My original search was:

[Serializable]

Which didn’t get me what I needed, I then tried:

[Serializable] C#

Again this failed to produce the results I wanted. So then I remembered something I read yesterday and I tried this:

C# [Serializable]

And miracle of miracles...The first item that came up was what I was looking for. So my new strategy for searching the MSDN site will be language first, then what I’m looking for. And the answer to my question is that [Serializable] is an attribute.