I just joined the Ruby and Rails communities and one thing I've really enjoyed is looking around GitHub at all of the various projects. Often times I can find s

I just joined the Ruby and Rails communities and one thing I've really enjoyed is looking around GitHub at all of the various projects. Often times I can find something to fit my needs right off the bat and every one of the projects provides a great resource for learning. My experience in .NET has been that, while there are communities of developers providing how-tos, tutorials and code samples, the community as a whole is more closed off. I can often find plugin solutions to problems but, in general, it feels like I'd better have my wallet ready. The major difference, I think, is that with .NET you are buying into an entire ecosystem and a pretty expensive one at that. This reduces the impact of the lone developer who is far more willing to share his code. I know you can get into .NET for free/cheap but a lot of the allure is the toolset.