Today Joel Spolsky is talking about performing daily builds of software. He recommends a product called FinalBuilder for a special price of $199. Looking at the FinalBuilder website it seems to be a product like Ant with a nice GUI, but targeted towards building software for windows.

What does the existence of such a product say about Windows software development? Hard to say really but it does make me think about what sort of open source community Windows developers have access to.

When I write Java there are a lot of different projects I can borrow resources from, does a similar ecosystem exist if I'm writing MFC code? Building a supportive community around a language is important for its adoption and growth. For Java, open source projects like Jakarta and many others have helped a great deal. Will a community develop around .NET, or does the whole attitude of Microsoft mean it never will? I don't mean that MS will actively prevent it, but is the feeling that you have to pay to play on windows so ingrained that people just won't share?