Free source code - too little time…

Skrevet - Saturday, June 2nd, 2007 kl. 17:38 | Kategori - Politik

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.

1. Finding the website for a company/service I know the name of, but not their website.
2. Pictures of something specific
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. The Code Project - articles, discussions and code snippets - a bit hard to navigate, but quality stuff.
3. C# Corner - like the Code Project, only harder to navigate.
4. 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.
5. GotDotNet - Microsoft’s community for .NET. Haven’t really used it for much yet - looks promising tho.