Why can’t the .net community be more like the Ruby on Rails community?

I’ve been reading a few blogs lately about how the .net community has let down some open source projects. The one that has comes to mind was nDoc. I’m guilty of this myself. However as I’ve become more aware of the importance of such projects I’ve realized the importance of either donating time or money to them to help them grow.
I had fallen into the trap that the .net community was only MSDN. Don’t get me wrong, this has been a wealth of information but I never felt I belonged to a community. The problem with having really only one voice in the community (Microsoft), some things important to the development community go largely ignored. Partly because Microsoft may feel that it’s not worth pursuing. I don’t blame them. I’ve met members of the tools team at Microsoft and I know they want to build the best development tools out there. However, they are only one company and they can’t build or think of everything. At the end of the day they need to make money!

The last 4 to 6 months, I’ve been getting my feet wet with Ruby on Rails. What I can tell you is that the Ruby on Rails community is thriving! Every day I find new information about the framework and how people are really excited about using it to build applications very quickly.  If there is something missing, many people have worked together to add it.

At the beginning I thought I was the only .net developer by day and a ruby on rails enthusiast by night. Wow was I wrong! I’m finding people online everday day that are doing the exact same thing!  It makes you stop to think why?  Is it because of the lack of tools in .net or is the lack of community that people are craving for!
I make my bread and butter with the .net framework but I’ve fallen in love with Ruby on Rails! Reading up on Rails has had me rethink of better ways of writing applications in C#.

On a positive note, I’ve seen that Microsoft has been paying attention to what’s going on in the rails community. (And other scripting languages) Features that make ruby so powerful have been adopted in the next version of C#. (LINQ is a perfect example of this)

Even if Ruby on Rails is the flavor of the month and eventually becomes yesterday’s news, it has had a positive effect of the future of the development languages. This has all been possible by a growing and supportive community like Ruby on Rails!