Coming from a community of enterprise software developers, I’ve spent the last three weeks evaluating the community aspects of Developer Force with an eye toward improving our overall process. One of those areas involves Workbook Recipes and Code Share, or what we collectively refer to as code samples. These are the techniques you’ve discovered, the problems you’ve sweated over and hope to share with like-minded developers in the hope that others can avoid the painstaking roadblocks you’ve encountered along the way.
As I’ve discovered, submissions to recipes and code share have been suspended and the current process for submitting code samples is on hold. The reason for suspending submissions is that we lacked the internal resources to support the process. Up to this point the process for submitting code samples to Developer Force was to:
- Submit your sample to the editorial team at Developer Force.
- Wait for feedback.
- Revise, resubmit and iterate until the code sample met editorial standards.
- Wait until the moderator posts so you can announce your code sample over social media channels.
As a community team leader with a strong bias towards open source sharing, I believe we can improve that process. Developers are used to sharing whatever they want in public code-sharing sites and letting the community vet the code, fork larger projects, and otherwise collaborate and improve them. From there it’s not difficult to make the leap to Github. Aside from being almost ubiquitous as a code-sharing site, developers are familiar with its features and are used to working in this collaborative fashion.
So, I would like to share our plan for migrating our current code base over to Github. I’d also like to share one of the many recent recipes I’ve received recently.
Our biggest issue at the moment is resources. Fortunately that’s what I’m here for. I’ll be working with developers on our team to review our existing recipes and code samples. We’ll ferret out some of the older samples that may be deprecated, then begin the process of migrating the archive. I’ll also be looking for the best way to structure the archive. Once I have the basic pieces in place, we’ll open the new Code Samples page on Developer Force.
I’ve put this project on my personal priority list and hope to have a basic code sharing mechanism up quickly. In the meantime, please feel free to share your code samples with me, as well as ideas you think might make for a more collaborative experience. Some ideas I’ve received recently include a list of “Editor’s Picks” and “Features of the Week.”
To wrap this post, I’d like to share a code sample I received this week from one of our Senior SFDC consultants, Afzal Mohammad. In this share, Afzal shows how .Net developers can create a reusable Visual Force component that takes a SOQL query, a list of headers and a list of fields at design time, and return the results. VF components are a powerful way to extend the environment so I wanted to share the technique. You’ll find his code sample at his blog.
Old Business
Last week I put out a call for articles, but as some have noted I neglected to mention where you can send these. The Developer Force Contribute page contains all of the information and links you’ll need to submit articles. If you need to reach me directly you can find me on Twitter mentioning @codeJournalist, through my LinkedIn page or right here on the Boards.
— Michael