CodeGallery is here
Since I left patterns & practices six months ago, it's been an interesting experience for me. After all, I spent my entire career at Microsoft in one group, it’s strange to move to a new boss, a new team, and a new set of responsibilities. Fortunately, my new boss is great, I love my team, and the new set of responsibilities have been a challenge to say the least. The main part of it has been taking over GotDotNet. When we got it, a lot of people had left it for dead. Customers were frustrated by it, partners were frustrated by it, and Microsoft employees (myself included) were frustrated. But no one denied that there was a need for it. Still, with several people jumping ship to SourceForge or other venues, it wasn’t exactly a great safe destination. One person suggested I was going from a rising ship (patterns & practices) to a sinking one (GotDotNet)—not exactly a smart career move. Still, I can look back now and feel really happy about my decision. Given that this week is my six-month anniversary, I am really excited about what we’ve accomplished. First off, it’s amazing how the complaints have gone down with GotDotNet. We essentially conducted a live autopsy, debugging the ugliness in production and spotting a lot of the key culprits. Here’s the story—the code wasn’t that bad. However, in reviewing it, the architecture left a little something to be desired. Also, there were a lot of little bugs that would create havoc. This really was death by a thousand cuts and we teamed with the Microsoft.com ops team to get a lot of band-aids. People I have talked to have been extremely pleased by, what one person described as “the revival of GDN”. When you put it that way, it’s kind of exciting. I don’t like quoting exact stats, but I will say that we’ve cut over 99% of the exceptions out of GotDotNet and Workspaces compared to last February. The “operations troubleshooting in progress” screen (the GDN equivalent of the fabled blue screen) is the exception rather than the rule nowadays. Plus, our deployments of new code have gone a lot smoother so that the general downtime (a huge complaint of customers) is on the order of minutes, not hours.
But we’re not just fixing old stuff—we’re building new stuff. Our first step into expanding our offerings is “CodeGallery”. It’s focused on the experience of community feedback. While Workspaces concentrates on the joint development of code and code check-in process, CodeGallery limits code activity to upload and download and instead orients the collaboration around idea sharing and feedback from members about the uploaded items. Each CodeGallery project is a “micro-community” on GotDotNet that is focused on collaborative feedback and code, documentation and idea sharing. To support this, we customization, message board creation, online reporting, bug tracking and message boards that enable members to work together in evolving a project whether it is code, documentation or conceptual. Of course, our beta testers in all of this was the patterns & practices team (you can take the guy out of p&p, but you can’t take the p&p out of the guy). They’ve been using Workspaces for years, but it has nothing to do with distributed development (which is what Workspaces is really supposed to be for). I see CodeGallery as a place where a lot of people can put their code and draw feedback from the community. It’s not necessarily collaborating on code (it’s not a source control tree, so the general public can’t commit changes), but it is gaining exposure to your stuff. I differentiate this from our user samples section by saying the user samples is a little more like “fire and forget”—you write the code and then release it to the world with no intention of following-up. With CodeGallery, you are interested in producing future versions and, therefore, invite feedback on bugs, feature requests, comments, etc. My hope is that creating this application will spur as many new projects as possible and help us build a rich library of code assets that will help people looking to develop on .NET. For the people who still want to collaborate, Workspaces is still open for business and we are continuing to work on a better solution there.
The increased performance/stability of the site and the launch of CodeGallery are just the first steps in what we are planning to do. I am even more excited about the next six months, including some of the things we will be targeting for Whidbey/Yukon launch as well as a second wave in the next calendar year. I can’t tell you about too much of it just yet, but keep your eye on the site. I think you’ll be pleased. And, of course, if you have any ideas, I'm all ears...
{Coldplay - X&Y}
Comments
Anonymous
August 29, 2005
Su gotdotnet, è nata una nuova directory, affiancata ai già
conosciuti workspaces, in cui si intende...Anonymous
August 31, 2005
I am proud to announce the public release of CodeGallery, the newest member of the gotdotnet family....Anonymous
August 31, 2005
Via Korby
I am proud to announce the public release of CodeGallery, the newest member of the gotdotnet...Anonymous
June 08, 2009
PingBack from http://jointpainreliefs.info/story.php?id=1553Anonymous
June 14, 2009
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