Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve started to move some of our sample assets over to GitHub, using the MIT license. So I can directly answer Ben’s question:

@ben_a_adams The sample code is now on GitHub. Check out this blog post: https://t.co/LXq2Ka1fLo

— Immo Landwerth (@terrajobst) September 16, 2014

Why did we move to GitHub?

The reasons we decided to move the samples to GitHub is as follows:

1. We want to be where our community is
2. GitHub offers an awesome browsing experience
3. GitHub enables conceptual documentation to be located with sample code
4. We want to be able to accept contributions

Let me take them one by one.

We want to be where our community is

The majority of the .NET community is on GitHub these days. Our principle is, and has been, to go where our customers are, rather than asking them to move somewhere else, say, MSDN Code Gallery.

GitHub offers an awesome browsing experience

The nice thing with GitHub is that it allows us to link to parts of the samples. For example, in SIMD we can point you to a specific line of code that shows how you can use the SIMD types to vectorize Mandelbrot:

https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-samples/blob/master/System.Numerics/SIMD/Mandelbrot/VectorFloat.cs#L29

GitHub enables conceptual documentation to be located with sample code

Sample code usually comes with at least a README file that explains how to get started. However, depending on the component the sample is for we may want to include a more comprehensive documentation. While sample code and documentation aren’t a replacement for MSDN, but we think they can provide a starting point for what will eventually become the official documentation.

Take, for example, the CLR Memory Diagnostics (CLRMD) library. The README.md file links to a more comprehensive documentation in the docs folder.

We want to be able to accept contributions

Publishing our samples to GitHub streamlines any updates. Team members can easily fix typos or clarify parts of the documentation using the web front-end.

But more importantly, it also enables you to provide sample code or propose changes. Many of you have asked about this for years — it’s finally a reality!

What about Visual Studio Online?

We love and use VSO for our private projects internally and think it’s the best one-stop-shop for cloud dev services (including full support for Git repos and unlimited private projects for free).  It just doesn’t support public projects today.

Summary

Please take a look at the new sample site on GitHub and let us know if you have any feedback!