My personal shift from custom .NET development into SharePoint development happened a little over a year ago, and in that amount of time, it’s been rewarding to see the SharePoint dev community blossoming. There are a number of fantastic blogs out there, and you only have to look as far as the tag cloud on CodePlex (see below) to see just how much activity is happening — and how much people are willing to share.
And yet I still find myself going through old projects and combing through the source of some of the larger CodePlex contributions for small specific pieces of code or functionality that I can’t quite remember how to implement. Then this morning I remembered CodeKeep.
I had the opportunity to work with Dave Donaldson in a prior life, and CodeKeep is one of his ongoing projects. CodeKeep isn’t new: it was mentioned in an MSDN article as far back as December 2005. But it’s a great utility for keeping track of all those small snippets of code: it definitely beats the heck out of surfing through previous projects. I think its real value comes from the fact that it’s both a web app and an add-in for Visual Studio. (You can see a screencast of both interfaces in action here.)
So around to the title of my post. I searched through the public snippets on CodeKeep, and out of 3400+ entries, a total of six came back as related to SharePoint (three of which I had just added). There’s a great opportunity for us to share our collective knowledge and experience. I’ve created an account and installed the add-in, and I’m starting to keep my SharePoint-related code snippets in CodeKeep — and I intend to mark as many of them as I can as "public" — meaning they’re searchable and available to the community at large. If you’re doing development on SharePoint, I encourage you to do the same.
We need people to keep writing blog entries and whitepapers and sharing projects on CodePlex, but those are time-intensive activities. But it doesn’t take much time to right-click in Visual Studio and choose "Add to CodeKeep" — and that piece of code might be just what someone else is looking for. Over time, the sum of those "microcontributions" to the SharePoint development community can help continue the momentum that’s been building over the last couple of years.
