Why aren't ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas Thriving Like Rails Plugins? [closed]

Question

I love the idea of the Portable Areas in MvcContrib. After reading up on it, and building a couple for practice, I was surprised not to find a plethora of open source projects leveraging this neat way to distribute features across MVC applications.

Being a guy who has messed around with Rails frequently, I love that I can find a plugin for just about anything. (Comments, Authentication, Search, CMS, Logging, etc.)

However, when searching for Portable Areas, the only ones I see are the samples and an OpenId implementation.

Where is the love for Portable Areas?

• Is it too new?
• Is there something wrong with the architecture?
• Is there just not as thriving an open source community as there is in Ruby world?

Answer 1

While I cannot answer your question about why there isn't a plethora of plugins using portable areas because this is a subjective question I can tell you why I don't use them: because they rely on custom VirtualPathProvider which don't work if your site is precompiled and I precompile my web applications before shipping.

I use NuGet instead of portable areas and there begin to be a plethora of packages distributed using this technology.