As I mentioned before, I am the Product Manager for the Koders.com website. I am responsible for the search engine, the source code index, the forums, the blog and the Content Management System.

magnifying glass My counterpart at Koders, Ben McDonald, is responsible for our client editions of the search engine which include the Enterprise Edition and the recently announced Pro Edition, which makes him one very busy fella.

He just recently blogged about a private beta we have going on for Pro Edition. The Pro Edition allows you to index and search code on your desktop. As far as I know, the initial beta only searches the file system, but future versions might index source control repositories just like the Enterprise Edition.

If you’re interested in trying it out and providing feedback, go ahead and sign up here.

The interesting part about this product for me is the tech:

Oh yeah, in case any of you are wondering we ended up with the following responses to the initial requirements laid out before us:

* 6.2 Mb installer
* SQLite embedded database
* Cassini Personal Web Server from Microsoft
* To make sure developers have something to search immediately after installation, we’ve bundled the indexed source code of our implementation of a Amazon A9 OpenSearch client, broken down into two projects, the business layer and the web UI layer

I believe that’s a heavily customized version of the Cassini web server. The product works similarly to how Google Desktop works in that you search via the browser. This allows you to let other developers search code on your machine, should you so choose.

So what makes the Pro Edition different from just using a normal Desktop search? I’ll let Ben answer that in more detail. But I’m betting he’ll talk about how we provide some degree of semantic analysis of the code, allowing you to search specifically for a method or class for example.