The Visual Studio Gallery

Once upon a time (ok, fine - 2 weeks ago), I was doing some Ruby development in Notepad and just had a craving for more.  Don't get me wrong - I love the raw performance of Notepad, but between Visual Studio (with R#) and Eclipse, I just had a need for something more aesthetically pleasing.  One thing that I've always loved about the Eclipse side of the universe is that if I'm ever in need of a new plug in, I can simply go to the Plugin Central portal and browse through hundreds of different plugins, from language tools to modeling tools.  As I was hoping, I came across a fantastic plugin for Ruby development.

If you hadn't noticed yet, we have now launched a similar one-stop-shop for Visual Studio add-ins - the Visual Studio Gallery.

One of the things that I found particularly interesting about the Visual Studio Gallery is in how you can source Visual Studio add-ins from a variety of different sources, from CodePlex to the new MSDN Code Gallery portal (if you just want to surface the code and not binaries), to your own hosting provider.  The particular combination of this with something like CodePlex strikes me as particularly cool.