CodeShare For Visual Studio.NET

posted on 2005-07-01 at 00:59:25 by Joel Ross

I'm trying to find an easy way for our team to share code, and the best way to gain adoption of something is to make it easy. Well, most of us spend all day in Visual Studio.NET, so why not find something that can be used in the IDE?

I found CodeShare. It's a VS.NET add-in that allows you to add and retrieve code snippets from a central repository. It looks pretty cool, and I'm looking for a server to install it on so I can test it out. If it works as advertised, then I'll start talking to the "higher ups" about how we can incorporate this into our processes.

In reality, code snippets are cool, but not always the most helpful. Why? Well, most code is specific to a particular problem. Not all code is - there's quite a bit of utility type code floating around - but a lot is specific to an implementation, and the code needs to be sterilized to generalize the solution. As an example, the abstract factory pattern is a very cool pattern that can be leveraged in many situations, but doesn't have a generic implementation that would fit into a code repository. On the other hand, a standard base page class that you could use as a start would.

Either way, I think it would be a good way to start collecting a set of code snippets, even if I just do it for myself. Anyone else using a code sharing program that they like?

Categories: Development