Free source code – too little time…
As I recently joined StumbleUpon, some of my search-phrases is that I’d like to see software-related sites… Now, after having used the service for a few weeks, I’m tempted to turn those off. There is no doubt about it – there are literally tons of code available out there. Getting what you want or need is a whole other story.
Back in the early days of the ‘net before there were link-farms, ad-farms and banner-farms, you’d search for something and actually end up on a site that would have what you were looking for. Well… I may be twisting truth a bit here, the problem would be to actually search for that exact string that would return the correct page. Also, information was a bit more scarce. What you get now, is 99 times out of a 100 a page with hundreds of links – and no content. Then if you click one of the links – you’ll 99 out of a 100 reach a matching site… and welcome to the marathon.
So, I’ve basically given up on Google for finding actual information except for a very few cases.
- Finding the website for a company/service I know the name of, but not their website.
- Pictures of something specific
- To replace some sites’ crappy search-box. Google is much more efficient at finding stuff on the Skat homepage (IRS in Denmark) than the inherit search-function.
So, what do you do to find quality C# code (which was what I wanted to do in the first place) – well, here are my top-5 picks for general coding snippets:
- SourceForge – Actual working applications, plug-ins and more. Brilliant idea, concept and you can find almost anything here to give a boost to your application.
- The Code Project – articles, discussions and code snippets – a bit hard to navigate, but quality stuff.
- C# Corner – like the Code Project, only harder to navigate.
- MSDN – Microsoft’s own attempt… there are tons of code here, finding it is hard tho – and much of the information is scattered between a lot of pages even on the same topic.
- GotDotNet – Microsoft’s community for .NET. Haven’t really used it for much yet – looks promising tho.