Ron Jacobs, the guy in charge, among others, on the MS application blocks, proposes that the community will now be responsible for creating new application blocks, under the leadership of MS devs.

While in theory this sounds good and well, I hate to break up a good party.

 

To be perfectly honest, I don't think this will work out too good. It's not that I don't have faith in the community, it's just that judging from past experiences people often can't find enough time to cooperate on this to make a reasonable outcome. The Data Application block v.3 is a good example. It's been "frozen" for a long time even though I find it totally usable as is.
The fact is that if this is something MS is in charge of, it gets better credibility and better reliability.
People don't want to again build their own stuff here. They want someone to show them how it's "supposed" to be done. An application block should be to a certain extent a "perfect" piece of reusable code. Mere community efforts won't make it so.
Even of you gathered all those people together under a MS dev with a team leader hat, it will be hard to actually manage these efforts and coordinate such a project into a good state in reasonable time.

 

Call me spoiled, but I'd rather MS keep doing their thing here and keep pushing out these blocks under a full MS hat. I want stuff that I can use easily that I know was developed and tested by the people who actually wrote the .Net framework.

 

As for community, I do see a place in the community to create a specialized suggestions,features and bugs site that deals solely with application blocks. People should be able to hand in their own ideas and so on, but the ultimate decision of what makes it into an actual block (and thus tested and possibly re-written) will be up to the guys in Redmond.

 

I know it sounds a bit weird, but this is one time I wish to see the community staying out of it(to a point). Just as I wouldn't want the community to release patches and upgrades to Visual Studio.Net, I wouldn't want code that is an official application block to be developed by non other than the mother ship.

Another good example would be my own attempt at an application block. the Extensibility application block comes to solve the problem of easily incorporating plugins into your Winforms application. It works, and it's cool, but I just don't have enough time to maintain it. All I can do is make it public and hope that MS will adopt it and make it(or use some of the ideas in there) into a real application block which is tested, supported and maintained.