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?