I am currently starting to dive into asp.net mvc and I really like what I see so far.. BUT I am somewhat confused about ‘drop-in’ functionality (similar to what rails and it’s plugins and nowadays gems are), an active community to contact etc.
For rails there’s github with one massiv index of plugins/gems/code-examples regarding mostly rails (despite their goal being generic source-code hosting..), for blogs, mailing lists etc it’s also pretty easy to find the places the other developers flock around, but… for asp.net mvc I am somewhat lost where to go/look. It all seems scattered across codeplex and private sites, google code hosting etc etc.. but is there one (or few places) where to turn to regarding asp.net mvc development, sample code etc?
I think that this sort of community thing is lacking from ASP.NET MVC. There is no real central resource for it, and Codeplex seems to be the major one, with some other sporadic code popping up on Google Code.
That said, if you head off to ASP.NET/MVC it’s a great place to start picking up knowledge about it. There’s enough linkage there to point you in the general direction of the wider community as well.
A couple of other people whose blogs I regularly read are Phil Haack’s and Scott Guthrie’s. Phil’s are more regular, but Scott’s are biblical in size and information (although that may also be the size of the images. :)). You could also find yourself reading Scott Hanselman but the ASP.NET MVC content are fewer and further inbetween. Stephen Walther also did a really excellent Tips series.
One final thing is ‘The Morning Brew‘ which is more for developers but has heavy leanings towards .NET.
I think though, that that major problem you’re having is that there isn’t really this “drop-in” functionality available for .NET or, to a certain extent, Visual Studio.