--- title: "Community application blocks revisited - with a twist" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/17/community-application-blocks-revisited-with-a-twist.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/17/community-application-blocks-revisited-with-a-twist.html" published: "2004-02-17T14:37:00" updated: "2004-02-17T14:37:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "A few days a go I had a very interesting chat with Ron “ build your own application blocks ” Jacobs (just kidding). The conversation was so interesting because Ron managed to explain to me something that was not obvious…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Community application blocks revisited - with a twist By Roy Osherove February 17, 2004 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published February 17, 2004; technical details may be outdated. A few days a go I had a very interesting chat with [Ron](http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs/) “[build your own application blocks](http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs/archive/2004/02/09/70355.aspx)” Jacobs (just kidding). The conversation was so interesting because Ron managed to explain to me something that was not obvious from his blog posts. Lemme explain. From his [posts](http://blogs.msdn.com/rjacobs/archive/2004/02/09/70355.aspx) you could understand that MS (wants to)is dropping blue bricks and letting the community maintain and build new ones from now on, with some MS reps acting as team leads. What became clear to me after chatting it up with Ron is that this is **not** the case. MSFT will **continue to create application blocks** but stuff that does not have time/budget allocations can be sent off and be built by the community, thereby speeding up the process of creating new blocks. Of course, there has to be some sort of organizing mechanism to take care of product quality, but this is one of manyare issues that can be addresses. So anyway, although Ron said he'll blog about it and explain his point of view, he didn't. Personally I thought you'd like to know this important tidbit. To me it makes all the difference in the world and I while I [didn't support](http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2004/02/10/70706.aspx) it at first I do support such a notion now that things are a bit clearer. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Feb 19, 2004 ### [Weekend off](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/19/weekend-off.html) - Feb 17, 2004 ### [We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/17/we-are-morons-a-quick-look-at-the-win2k-source.html) - Feb 17, 2004 ### [Book of the month](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/17/book-of-the-month.html) - Feb 15, 2004 ### [Small Israeli DevDays rants](https://osherove.com/blog/2004/2/15/small-israeli-devdays-rants.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/