It would be nice to have some additional feedback on codeshare items to aid the originator and the consumers.
For instance it’s probably not worth me spending time updating a share that nobody has downloaded, but I might spend a bit more time on a really popular share.
Also when choosing a share to use it would be useful to have some feedback or rating from other users who had used it.
@ andre.m - that would be nice. I’m in 2 minds as to how a star rating would work.
The attached forum thread can be a hint how popular an entry is, but I know what you mean. A vote from 1 to 5 and the number of votes it’s based on would be a nice addition.
@ andre.m - the worst thing would be to discourage people from sharing. A 1 star on your first share might do that.
But hey, you can only get better 
Joke aside.
If you have to have a minimum rank to vote, than trolls would have less chances.
And if more experienced users give bad ratings, then usually for a reason.
But no matter if a good or bad rating: a reason for the rating should always be a must.
I’m of mixed feelings on this.
There’s a significant part of me that wants to see codeshare become an archive only, with no further development other than ensuring that the code there is always accessible.
Instead, I’d sooner see GHI create a library on Github, Bitbucket, Codeplex, etc, or create something similar to what mBed has, so that interested parties can submit patches/pull requests, and contribute to the code.
Codeshare is a great resource, but it’s purely one-way. I can update code I’ve submitted, but no one else can. And the only way to use the code is cut & paste, which isn’t necessarily optimal either.
Granted, there are lots more issues to consider here. But I’m just not sure there’s great value in GHI continuing to invest in Codeshare as the solution for sharing code. Would be better to have one place where all of GHI’s OSS code, plus any community-submitted code, could live.
You can download project zip files, and I think even single file entries can be downloaded.
Big giant +1 on this. Code sharing systems have been created that are miles ahead of Codeshare. Wikis, issue submission, code versioning, releases, etc. GHI should (IMO) get out of the website/social networking business and back into the hardware/firmware business.
Ah, right. Forgot about that…well, never mind that point, but I think the larger point still stands.
Codeshare made sense when there weren’t better options. I’m not convinced it’s still the best solution.
To be clear, I’m not criticizing the decision to stick with it. There are likely to be substantial transition costs in moving to any other solution. So if GHI has made the decision that those costs outweigh any benefit in some other way of sharing code, I’m not going to second-guess them…they know their business better than I ever could.
Having spent some time with mBuino recently, I’m really liking their model. And while I’m not holding my breath for an online IDE/Compiler for NETMF any time soon, I think the ability to easily import a library into a project directly from the IDE (Nuget, anyone?) is REALLY convenient.
@ andre.m With any type of code sharing system you can have abandoned code and multiple entries for the same thing. It is not unique to Codeshare.
@ hagster There used to be “number of downloads” counter in addition to “number of views”.
In any case, codeshare is just another option. Anybody can maintain the code on any other system. And just share the link in a forum post.
@ Architect - do you know why it was abandoned?
I dunno…for my code, having someone else edit it would probably improve the quality.
:whistle:
@ Architect - The problem with anybody maintaining their code on any other system is that there’s no central repository that folks can easily search for applicable code. Being able to search codeshare and find relevant snippets and projects is a big boon, and that would be lost by distributing code across various OSS options. To some extent, this is already true, since some code is already up on Codeplex, while other stuff is sitting out on blogs somewhere (guilty as charged for my IR emitter driver…though that’s not even the source).
IMO, having a bunch of code in many different locations, with links in random forums, would be a worse situation than any limitations of codeshare.
@ devhammer - I agree that it is hard to perform a search across multiple sources. I don’t see the solution for that other than “natural selection”. Eventually less popular systems will disappear. Unfortunately so will the content that was created there.
Are you sure you’re not thinking of google?!?
We already use Google to search the forum…
Overall I quite like the simplicity of codeshare. I’m not sure I’d want it to be like github or other collaborative code repository.
I kind of look at codeshare as a way to use an existing account / credentials (GHI Forums) to share some code that others may find useful. You don’t need to understand github, codeplex or any other sharing location to use it, but you also don’t get the benefit of the features like multi author, branching, pull requests, builds/releases, etc. I tend to see it as a “snippet” repo rather than a “significant project” repo, but that may be more my interpretation/slant - sure, there are some major works there, and some major complete projects, but I suspect fewer of those get re-used than the snippet/driver type of entry.
If someone wanted to share more of their project than made sense to share via codeshare, or they created a framework that had significantly more usefulness to the community than others, then moving to github / codeplex or similar makes much more sense in my view - but when to trigger the switch is the hard thing to know and probably varies on a case-by-case basis. The DL40IO firmware is a good example of something that evolved and grew-up and grew-out of codeshare. Makes much more sense to have it in codeplex once feature requests started flowing in and revisions and such became more important.
Is there a right answer ? I think not - codeshare still has a place in the more informal sharing scenarios.
GitHub has a snippet sharing system: https://gist.github.com/
Also, it would be nice if GHI supported OpenID. One less password to remember.
Here’s a good example of combining a codeshare listing with a repo on github:
https://www.ghielectronics.com/community/codeshare/entry/958
Makes the code entry searchable on GHI’s site, while still allowing contributions.
One downside I can see is that if the author does not update the codeshare listing regularly, it could easily get way out of sync with the repo, which would be a shame.
But this is probably a decent enough way to post the code in a way that increases visibility while still allowing others to fork and/or contribute to the original project.
I think I’ll start doing that as well. Should also work for mBuino-based stuff, too.