Dave Donaldson

CodeKeep

Saturday, August 20 2005

This is an announcement long in the making: CodeKeep is finally ready for mass consumption. I won't go into some big long explanation about what it is because the web site takes care of that, but the essential thing to know is that CodeKeep is an easy way to store, share, and search for code snippets online.

You can use CodeKeep two ways: by using the web site itself or by installing the add-in for VS.NET 2003 and using it right from within the IDE. With regards to getting this out the door, I've taken great strides in making sure it's of the highest quality. If you've been wondering why I've barely blogged the last couple months, download the add-in and use CodeKeep and you'll understand. It's been a fun, yet time-consuming process, but I feel worth every late night spent on it (and believe me there have been way too many to count).

My goal with CodeKeep from the beginning was to create a very simple way to store and search for code snippets, and to create a massive distributed community from which to pull code snippets from. My hope is that developers everywhere use CodeKeep to foster an increased sharing of code so that in the end, we are all more productive because of it.

As you use CodeKeep, keep these things in mind:

• When searching for snippets, only snippets marked as “public“ will be returned in the results. You can view your own “private“ snippets, but not anyone else's.
• When adding a public snippet, don't fret if it doesn't show up in the search results right away. Give it time for the full-text catalog to repopulate (think Google).
• The search results will get better over time as more snippets are added to the repository. So get your snippets in there and keep adding to it for all your projects.

I've also created RSS feeds for CodeKeep: one for the main feed and one for each of its programming languages. Each language feed contains all public snippets stored in CodeKeep for that language for the last 7 days. This allows you to subscribe to not only the main feed, but to individual language feeds as well so that you are always up-to-date with newly added code snipppets.

I think that about does it for now. I don't necessarily have any type of expectations around CodeKeep; I'm just hoping developers see the value in it as a way to increase their productivity. If CodeKeep does well and is used by many I'll be ecstatic, and if it doesn't, well, I guess I'll get to that later.

One last thing to tell you: CodeKeep is free. So what are you waiting for? Check out the web site, create an account, download the add-in, and start storing, sharing, and searching code snippets with greater ease than ever before.