My beef with .NET is that the platform and community does not feel very organic like it is with others. Making a huge generalization, I would say that the .NET community waits around for the Mother ship to produce something that it can use. This was one impetus for the ALT.NET movement.
It was first created by non-MS guys, and there are others out there by community members. MS decided to form an officially-endorsed open source project for NuGet. Pretty good model actually. It's a collaboration of MS employees and community members and they take outside contributions. Not sure what's wrong with that. It needed to be in VS to take off.
The organic community is there, it's just not the dominant one but it has a significant presence.
>> It's a collaboration of MS employees and community members and they take outside contributions. Not sure what's wrong with that.
I agree, nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of the stuff that MS has been doing under Scott Guthrie in recent years has been very good in regards to fostering a better community.
>> It needed to be in VS to take off.
Do you think NuGet would be successful if MS had not officially endorsed the project?
Lots of things are successful without MS endorsement. If the integration had been as good as it was when it launched, yes. Only MS was willing to dedicate the resources to make that happen (VS addins, gallery site, etc).
A great example of community in action is the castle project at http://www.castleproject.org/
In the year 2010, .NET finally has a package management system. Guess who created it?