Jaa

I've got a fever and the only prescription is more code...

  • Artikkeli

For anyone who has seen the Saturday Night Live "Behind the Music" parody with Christopher Walken about "needing more cowbell" (possibly my favorite skit of all time), you might get that joke of the blog entry title. Now that CodeGallery is open for business, we are getting to work on the much more exciting part--recruiting projects. When I was switching over to this job, I spent my time selling the powers-that-be (those that held the fate of GotDotNet in their hands) that I wanted to build Safeco Field so that I could eventually work on putting together the Seattle Mariners (I wanted to use Camden Yards and the Orioles as the analogy, but when in Rome...). While I was psyched to be given the opportunity to help "revive" the site, I was really more excited about the potential activity on the site. However, I knew that without a stadium for the baseball players to play, the game would never get started. That's why I took on the first part of the job. Well, while that job isn't over, at least now we have a place that can get some games started. Between User Samples, CodeGallery, and Workspaces, we now have places where different levels of distributed development can occur. User Samples is tried and true and CodeGallery is an up-and-comer. Of course,

 Workspaces has taken its lumps in the past but we're constantly working on the performance issues I am confident that we will have some cooler features for users in the next six months (not to sound like Scoble, but I can't wait to tell you about what we have in store!). But, as Craig Anderra once told us, bells and whistles are nice but don't skimp on basic functionality. We've taken that message to heart and we will continue to do so...

Back to the cowbells, er, code. As I mentioned earlier, while we continue to improve Safeco Field, it's time to start to put together the players that plays on our field. To take a steal an already stolen phrase, "it's the software, stupid!" We are looking high and low inside and outside Microsoft for cool projects. There's a ton of cool code inside Microsoft that could do so much good in the hands of developers looking to create cool apps or just learn how to best write managed code. But just as exciting are all the great projects out there that don't have a very visible home (don't be surprised if you get an e-mail from me or Korby Parnell asking you if you want to play with us :->). I'd love to see people move their existing code over to CodeGallery to solicit feedback or even start new projects. If you build something cool, we can help get you visiblity with hundreds of thousands of users that visit our site every month. My good friends at the Microsoft User Group in Hyderabad (I visited them in India last year and had a great time talking about code) are putting together a "TechFest" contest that we are co-sponsoring. I can't wait to see the cool projects that come out of that and I think GotDotNet will be a great place for them to share their code with one another while in progress. I'm hoping other user groups take a cue from them and run their own contests. Heck, I'll even give you the free t-shirts! And if the code is really good, maybe we can work out some GDN Cowbells...

{Death Cab for Cute - Plans}

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