Reimagining www.asp.net, Part Four: The Toolbox Experience

Where do you go when you want to find a library or component that performs some specific function you need? Do you go to one of the many open source hosting sites like CodePlex, Google Code or GitHub? Or do you just Google/Bing until you stumble upon something that might work, try it out, find out it doesn’t, rinse and repeat.

What do you do when you’re looking for an API or third-party commercial component to integrate with your apps? More Googling, more trying things out, more wasting time.

The problem is there’s no central directory of these sorts of things. Nothing where people can rate and review projects to give you some idea of whether or not they’re worth your time. Nothing to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Toolbox section of the ASP.NET site would be a great place to centralize all of these things but limited to just stuff that works with ASP.NET.

It could be community-managed (like a structured wiki) but offer the option for specific entries to be “claimed” by their owners. Only users with sufficient reputation (earned throughout the site) would be able add entries or make changes.

Open Source Project Directory

I’d like to have a better way to locate good open source libraries (I’ve seriously considered building this for Managed Assembly and it still might happen). They’re currently all spread out across different hosting sites so a central directory would make them easier to find.

Each project can add links to their project home page, downloads, issue tracker, mailing list, etc. They could also provide their RSS feed URLs so the latest news from each project could be displayed right on their listing.

Visitors would be able to add favorites/follow/become a fan of projects which could provide for customized news feeds for just your favorite projects. Users would be able to rate and review projects as well. In addition to favoriting (which is for personal use), users could select ‘I Use This’ to publically show their support for projects. Ratings + reviews + user counts would help narrow the list when trying to find the right OSS project for your needs.

This is essentially what Ohloh does, but I’d like it specific to projects that work with ASP.NET. Like other parts of the site, this could be a subset of a larger directory that is for all of .NET.

API Directory

Similar to the open source project directory would be a directory for APIs that work with .NET. There are so many useful APIs out there that people don’t know about. Companies would jump at the chance to increase exposure for their APIs. They can provide getting started articles, code samples, etc. APIs would be able to be reviewed and rated just like open source projects.

Commercial Product Directory

This might very well not be even remotely feasible and considering the hubbub over ads on the home page, it’s a treacherous topic to even broach. But I’ve been operating in a “in a perfect world” mentality since I started this series, so keep that mind here.

Like the open source project and API directories, I’d like to see another directory of commercial products built to work with ASP.NET. This would operate identically to the open source directory above, just separated so that it’s clear that these entries cost money.

Would the community take the time to list commercial products? Would it even be useful for finding the right tool for your project? Would vendors support such a concept? This is probably the most risky of any idea I’ve proposed, but I think it would work and be extremely valuable.

A Place for Ads

This is the place on my version of the site where ads make complete sense. You’ve got people looking for tools. They’re in the right mindset and they’re actively searching out new things. Ads could actually be useful to them. They don’t disrupt what the user was trying to do (unlike the home page). Advertisers might not get the same number of eyeballs, but the ones they do get would be highly-targeted.

Conclusion

And so this little project comes to an end. I’m happy with how it turned out. I had a lot of fun thinking through each section and am glad to hear that it caught the attention of the people who are in a position to make changes. Microsoft deserves credit for the recent progress they’ve made with the lightweight MSDN view, the Web Application Toolkits, the MSDN Beginner Developer Center, etc. and I’m sure they have a lot more in the works.