What would Visual Studio Team System Blogging look like?

Back in the day, when I used to code for a living, I used to crave integrated communication tools for developers. When you've got your head down and your tail up, furiously coding away at a specification, you don't have time to fill in discussion forums, etc on the companies internal team site. And lets not even go near the whole "comment your code" business.

So I had an idea the other day, what if there was a tool that lived inside Visual Studio 2005; where as you were coding away, you could highlight a piece of code, right click on the code window, and select "Blog This!".

You would then be presented with a dialog box that allowed you to enter a quick post, including any hyperlinks to external web references (in case the inspiration for your latest change came from the world wide web). The add-in would then update a project centric Team Blog (it would appear in the Team Explorer with the Work Item/Documents/Builds folders) with your post, including a reference to the location of the code, and your highlighted code snippet. And what's more, when you check-in the pending changes into SCC, it would update the blog with the change-set reference too.

Hmm, I think this is a good place to start the ideation process...any thoughts my friends??

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2005
  Is that just like commenting your code ;) Maybe use a special format to get the IDE to insert a uniq ID, start and end tags, and that can link back to a live comment / blog server???
• Anonymous
  June 19, 2005
  It's kind of like advanced commenting, only instead of the information and code being locked away from searching, etc. in some code repository, it is available via RSS technology or just plain ole' browsing. Jeez Karl, softer next time, it doesn't take much for my skin to split ;)
• Anonymous
  June 21, 2005
  Would that not be rather revealing to your competitors?
  
  John