Basics for the community

About sharing knowledge via code snippets

Lines of code is all about code snippets – that’s what it’s designed for. Although you don’t necessarily have to publish your code snippets in this community, this doesn’t meet the original purpose of linesOfCode. The aim is to impart knowledge about code snippets, to assist in the daily programming work and to broaden the users’ horizon.

However, this forces us to establish code snippets of good quality in order to create a vivid and smooth exchange of information and knowledge. Thus, I ask you to keep in mind the following three basic rules when making a contribution to linesOfCode.

Basic Rules

• (1) Ensure all code snippets you publish are working.
  Of course, the lines of code community wants you to write the cleanest and most effective code. Ok, to be honest, that isn't realistic, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't care about the code snippets you publish. You have to ensure all your code snippets are working and do not suffer from syntax or symantic failures.
• (2) Inform about necessary libraries being used.
  Nothing is more frustrating than copying a code snippet from the internet and realize it won't work until all necessary libraries will be included / imported. But which libraries are missing to get things working?
• (3) Write comments for main parts of your code snippet.
  All relevant comments have to be given inside the code snippet. Therefore, you can use the suitable comments syntax of the programming language.

Snippet Example

'The following sample describes a method to 
'read all text of a given file and assign 
'it to a string variable.
    
'Necessary libraries 
Imports My.Computer.FileSystem
 ...
Dim pathToFile as String = "C:\test.txt"
Dim fileContent as String = ""

'assign the whole file content to the variable fileContent 
'using the ReadAllText() method
fileContent = ReadAllText(pathToFile, System.Text.Encoding.ASCII)
 ...