Overview of Codezone.com

The official launch of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 in New York City went very well. That was one big crowd of attendees! I had a chance to meet Trisha Lacey from Microsoft who was there to promote Codezone.com—a site for the developer community, which debuted back in June. When you hear of yet another site which aggregates blogs, local news, forums and what not it’s easy enough to dismiss it, but I think Codezone is on to something interesting.

First, I was quite surprised to learn that Codezone was developed and maintained by Microsoft. Second, Codezone is very community oriented. By that I mean you can search developer gigs run by your local user group(s); web casts, seminars, etc. As a resource provider you can register and advertise your own user group.

Codezone also has a way to single out sites and blogs with good buzz and put them in front of people. For example, there’s an interesting passage about “recommended” content:

Recommendations are generated by a much more complex formula [than 1 to 5 ratings–ed.] of information that comes from user behavior on the site. The current formula will certainly change over time, to improve the user experience. In general, MyCodezone uses a democratic method of choosing popular content. The content itself does not necessarily reflect the opinions of site administrators, editors, or Microsoft Corp.

Anyway, I think Codezone is loaded with a lot of helpful stuff. If you’ve been to the site, what was your impression?