The fine folks over at GotDotNet alluded to a simpler way to share code at Tech Ed in June, and it's now live. It's called Code Gallery, and it's a solution for all of the developers who just used the Workspaces as a way to distribute code, rather than a full-blown source code control system (think .Text). In fact, it looks a lot like a Workspace if you took away the source code control system.

This is a good step forward. One of the strengths of Workspaces was the collaboration you could get among a team, but it was always billed as a source code control system. The ability to have a discussion about the project and track bugs wasn't the main focus - it was an "oh, you get that too" kind of thing. Now, the focus is completely on the collaboration of the people you invite to be a part of your community.

This is something I could see being useful for customer feedback. I'll use Tourney Logic as an example. Every year, we release a new version of the Tourney Pool Manager. We get feedback in a limited fashion based on whether they send it to us.

But what if we invited a subset of our customers to join our Code Gallery. Throughout the whole process, we could have a structured way to get feedback every step of the way, from requirements all the way to final release. Obviously, you have to have a good set of customers to provide feedback, but that's obvious. The thing you get from this is the structure of the community - without having to build the infrastructure yourself.

This looks like a good step in the right direction for GotDotNet. Now, if we could just get Team System integrated into the Workspaces...