VMware Code Central Blog

First off, thanks to the scripting community for spreading the word around about CodeCentral.
There is a lot more visibility for this site now and from this point CodeCentral could be used as an effective tool for the community to share scripts since it's, that's right, "Visible".

Talking about Visibility, I have done some research on how to make scripts visible themselves. I also uploaded a document somewhere in CodeCentral about script posting guidelines, and I thought I would put it up on the main page too. Then it occurred to me that I should get communities advise on this topic. Before I ask you community virtual beings, I wanted to share my opinion on guidelines.

In my opinion the following attributes to a sample code makes it visible and user friendly:

• A Descriptive name to sample script/code
• Note on what task your script/code is performing
• Relevant tags for searching
• A screen shot of your script's trail run
• A well documented script/code
• Additional links(resources, related sample codes, etc)

A Descriptive name

I'm not going to dwell on this since the importance of this is known to all you programmers out there. But to beat the dead horse, here's the link

Relevant Tags

I want to emphasize on the usage of tags because it is critical to my routine stand up on "visibility". A script/code's visibility is enhanced and in some case the only source of visibility comes by using proper, relevant and multiple unique tags.

To make my point more clearer, I am using a previously posted script as an example. The below script has more tags attached that one of the CodeCentral's suggested tag, i.e., "storage".

Then I did a google search for this script

Tada!, the first result is the relevant script.

Coming up with tags is no art, they come out of your code's task. Usage of default tags suggested in addition will help organize the content better. So this will give the ability to click on the relevant tags and get relevant results in the search which is shown below:

A screen shot of your script's trail run

William Lam pointed out that most of the scripts at CodeCentral do not have a sample run attached with them. I think it's a valid point because for a person like me who is new to visualization scripting, it would be very helpful to know what I'm supposed to expect after I start running a script. I urge the community to attach sample on run on content you are going to be posting. 

I'm not going to talk too much about well documented code and additional links. Most coders in this community post documented code which is understandable hence no point in wasting your time about it. As far additional links go, they are optional and it would certainly help for someone lagging prerequisites in understanding a script to post links to VMware documentation or community blogging sites explaining the same concept. 

With that I will close my opinions and now I'm open for your views on what you should be the guidelines for posting scripts. You may comment here or email me about it. I will also put up a suggestions box on CodeCentral soon. Stay tuned for more to come! Thanks