In the open source world, there are zillions of resources and examples for developers.  Practically everything you need/want to do, there is an example, some documentation, or a demonstration project that someone has put out that either gives you the answer you seek, or leads you down the path to glory.  And, among these zillions of resources, you can find everything from bad code to just the right answer to truly inspirational.  Browsing around this weekend, I found some inspirational stuff that I think is worthy of my wicked awesome blog.

IDesign, and more specifically the downloads section, is awesome.  I'm sure that you have come across this before, but this was the first time I had seen this site, and the source is just awesome.  I had been trying to do exactly what the Dynamic Factory project does, and I never quite got it figured out, and then to see their concise, tiny, simple solution was inspiring to me.  I love it.  I also found a bunch of their threading helpers and service helper stuff really interesting.

Kigg is my second inspiring resource.  "Kigg is a Digg like application developed with ASP.NET MVC Framework, LINQ to SQL and ASP.NET AJAX."  In itself, its just a mvc website written in asp.net, but the way it was written, is awesome.  It is just simple, elegant, and I actually learned a lot from some of the techniques, namely their code benchmark class, and it inspired me to do a lot more interface based development.  And, in my opinion, the unit tests are really well done, and I had no idea you could reference an mvc application from your unit tests just as if it was an assembly.  (As you can tell, I am not on my a game in the area of unit tests.).

Anyway, I find it really interesting, and quite funny, where and how people find inspiration in different aspects of their lives.  These two projects/sites really seemed to get me on track again, like a new high quality resource tends to do, and maybe it will do the same for you.

Jesse Foster | jf26028