Reimagining www.asp.net – Introduction

I work with ASP.NET nearly every day. It’s the primary platform we use at my day job, my startup’s main product uses it and I even spend a fair amount of my free time building sites in ASP.NET just for the fun of it. I think it’s a great platform. It’s not without its faults but I’m generally able to accomplish what I want or need to with it.

You would think with the amount of time I spend using ASP.NET that I would spend a fair amount of time at www.asp.net reading docs, getting support, helping others, learning more about the framework. But I’m almost never there. In fact, I think the only time I’ve visited recently is to download ASP.NET MVC. It was a decent resource years ago when I started seriously moving away from Classic ASP to ASP.NET but the site didn’t grow with me as I grew as a developer.

A lot has changed in web development in the past few years as well. There are a lot more web frameworks available, jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks have revolutionized client-side development and even ASP.NET has evolved, most notably with the release of the MVC framework.

The web itself has changed too. There’s a lot of value now in having your sites and services provide a social aspect to them. You’ve seen how compelling this type of thing can be if you take part in the vibrant community of .NET devs on Twitter. This is where the .NET community hangs out, shares ideas, argues about stuff and solves problems together.

Unfortunately www.asp.net hasn’t evolved along with the community it was intended to support and the current state of affairs on the web. I thought to myself, “How would you build www.asp.net if you could start from scratch?” I decided to write a series of articles to answer that question. I’m breaking it up into four parts that will be posted throughout the week (links will be updated as each part is posted):

I do not claim to have all the answers. These are strong opinions, weakly held. I would love to get your feedback throughout the week so that when the series is over, it’s something Microsoft can point to and say, “This is what the community needs from us.” Don’t hesitate to chime in with your thoughts, especially if you disagree with me.

Part one will be posted Monday night or Tuesday morning. Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on Twitter to be notified as each part is posted.

Posted September 20th, 2009 10:59 PM
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  • It'll be interesting when you get to part 3, but these are fundamental issues. When you compare www.asp.net to the other major web stacks (php, ruby and django) the difference is staggering. The open source stack's websites all have no advertising, cleaner and easier to use sites, and better quality content.

    I'm pretty sure that MS' solution to throw money at the problem IS the problem. They should simply cut their budget down to relative pennies and see what they can make of it.
  • Looking forward to reading your posts!
  • This should be good, really looking forward to it. The asp.net site in its current form is about the WORST advertisement for asp.net as a technology there is.

    I think the main problem is that the site's performance is awful. It's bloated and slow, and posting on the forums is a nightmare. It badly needs a makeover.
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