.NET code sharing: How can we fix it?
Leveraging code written by other developers is a big big deal.
You can ship more features in less time. You can have more fun playing with cool features that would take you months to write yourself. You can learn by studying other peoples APIs and design decisions. You can explore different possibilities to solve problems by scouting for libraries that may serve your needs.
I don't think code sharing is anywhere near easy enough in .NET right now. It's still a complex process to get leverage from the vast quantities of code us developers are sharing online. All that code and so little sharing. Sad.
If we had something like Ruby Gems, then we could do stuff like this...
c:\MyProject\> lib update ASP.NET-MVC
c:\MyProject\> lib install NHibernate
c:\MyProject\> lib install NHibernate.Validators
c:\MyProject\> lib install RSS.NET
c:\MyProject\> lib update Lucene.NET
Better. Much better. Of course, we'd want a Visual Studio plugin for exploring and installing libraries.
Does anyone else agree that we need this kind of functionality in .NET?
Comments
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Without a doubt I can say .Net needs this.
There have been a few attempts at emulating gems in .Net, however I think they’ve all lacked one thing: content. It’s not so much how gem works, more that it just does work.
I think somebody needs to decide on a distribution mechanism, any mechanism, and then get some projects on it. Initially it’d be upto the developer to package up existing projects (NHiberate, Castle, etc), but as long as the packaging process is easy enough, getting OSS developers to incorporate it wouldn’t be that difficult.
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codekeep isn’t Ruby Gems but it’s kind of a step in that direction.
that would be way awesome for libs especially like NHibernate/ActiveRecord type stuff.
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We’re going down the Starter-Kit path these days; http://ra-ajax.org/Starter-Kits.aspx and we’ll probably end up with creating a lot of starter-kits as we progress. Including kits with ActiveRecord support and so on. I think (and users are telling me they like it) that this is a viable way to “share code” ;P
.t
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Hi Thomas
Those starter kits look great. I’ve always liked this approach when learning something new.
We’re currently knocking some ideas around for a .NET library sharing solution, with the plan to launch something in private Beta within the next month or so. It’s open source, and “funded by enthusiasm”, so the deadline is a moving target :)