[Discussioni]FYI: code swapping

[Alessandro Rubini]

http://iwsun4.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/06/19/010619hncodeswap.xml?0620weam

   [space.gif] ATLANTA -- TAKING a page from the habits of the
   underground developer communities, Microsoft Tuesday announced that it
   has set up a Web site to swap snippets of code for building Web
   services based on its .NET initiative.
   Announced alongside the second beta release of Visual Studio.NET at
   TechEd here, Microsoft has launched a service called CodeSwap that
   allows developers to highlight a segment of code from within Visual
   Basic.NET and send it to a depository where other developers can view
   it and incorporate it into their own projects.
   The CodeSwap service itself is a Web service that plugs into Visual
   Studio.NET and enables developers to publish and maintain a source
   code index from within their applications and to search the database
   for other pieces of code.
   The database, which can be accessed at www.vscodeswap.com, has some
   similarities to the concept embraced by the open-source community,
   where developers share code freely.
   "It's not an open-source project," said Dave Mendlen, lead product
   manager for the Microsoft Developers Network and Visual Studio.NET. He
   did note that Microsoft will provide a few hundred snippets of generic
   Web services code that developers can study and use. He compared
   CodeSwap to the communities he used on CompuServe when he was a
   developer years ago.
   Microsoft said the main reason it launched the community is to drive
   more developers to its platform and make it easier for companies to
   build Web services with their current applications. In fact, the
   concept of easing the development process is inherent to the .NET
   initiative, Mendlen said. The .Net Framework, which provides all of
   the infrastructure, applications, and tools necessary to build and run
   Web services, was created so other companies did not have to build the
   infrastructure themselves. Many of the early adopters of .Net agreed.
   ".NET really makes it a lot easier for companies to deploy Web
   services," said John Buchanan, director of business development at
   Serena Software, which helped build new functions into Visual
   Studio.Net. "They don't have to start from scratch."
   Other functions included in the Visual Studio.NET also have eased the
   development process. One called Intellisense will automatically finish
   writing lines of codes when it recognizes what a developer begins to
   write. The technology is based on the function already used in
   Microsoft's Office suite, which does similar tasks when writing a date
   or a commonly used name. With similar technology, Visual Studio.Net
   will also highlight lines of code that it senses may have been written
   incorrectly.
   Developers here have noted that the new additions to Visual Studio.NET
   include a number of other features that ease the code-writing process.
   "It was pretty painless moving to .NET," said Tore Lode, senior
   software engineer at CyberWatcher, a Norwegian company that built a
   Web service for aggregating content from the Web, databases, and
   corporate intranets, which doubles as a Smart Tag in Office XP. "Most
   people are really happy to change to [Visual Studio.Net]."
   Matt Berger is a San Francisco-based correspondent for the IDG News
   Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.