We moved your ASP.NET website cheese, in a good way
We've just pushed live an update to the http://www.asp.net site. This is the first of a series of updates to the site we'll be making this year.
The home page for the site was getting bogged down with info and was too visually busy. It was too complex for beginners and too intense for advanced folks. Our focus with today's update is to make it easy for new folks to get started, but still make it easy for advanced people to get what they want in few clicks.
Getting Started
The Get Started section is completely new and we'll be adding even more content and samples from Joe Stagner and Jon Galloway in the coming weeks. Both guys are working on complete applications for ASP.NET WebForms 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2, as well as tutorials and videos for each.
- We've added a new Overview Video for total newbies as well as a "Choosing the Right Programming Model" video to help folks decide between ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC.
- We've also added new "Building your 1st ASP.NET Application" as well as a step-by-step video showing how to install ASP.NET and the free VS Express videos, both by Laurence Moroney
WebForms and MVC
Both the WebForms and MVC sections have been completely reorganized with two things in mind. First, there's a lot of videos on the site, but they were poorly categorized and hard to find. Second, we weren't ordering the videos in a way that's conducive to learning. Every video on the site has been re-categorized and been organized in a more logical way. Videos are short, to the point and their lengths have been included on the listing pages. We'll continue to make improvements with the goal to make everything easy to find with upcoming changes including tagging, ranking, etc.
Community
We've added lots of content to the Community page in an active widget that aggregates news, blogs, podcasts, videos, forum activity and more. We've also added widgets to suck in content from Twitter, Digg and Delicious.
Open Source
Jon has also added an Open Source section to the site with a list of frameworks, applications, and tools that ASP.NET developers might be interested in. They're hand-picked by Jon, so if he missed one that he should consider, let him have it.
Hosting
You'll hear more soon about how it's easier to deploy ASP.NET applications to hosters, and we've added a "Find a Hoster" page that will showcase hosting deals, like Shared, Virtual, or Dedicated hosts.
There's lots of fun to come, but here's Step 0. I hope it help! Thanks to everyone, Cyra, Othmane, Laurence, Jon, Joe, Terri, KevinG, and to ScottGu for kicking us all in the butt daily. Please sir, may I have another? ;)
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
About Newsletter
We will do a few things and do them very, very well; we are better off not having a capability than doing it poorly. There are always future versions.
I understand there will be future iterations of the site like you mentioned, but doing it poorly is worse than doing it later. You aren't obligated to have a new version of EVERYTHING for the sake of MIX10. Sorry pals, I really hoped to say "Good job"!!
Could the team possibly relax the password requirements? Currently it's set to at least one uppercase char and at least one number. The problem is I can never remember the pesky password! I can understand the these kind of password requirements for internet banking websites but surely not for a forum site?
Thanks
I'm sure it was a big undertaking having seen the old infrastructure behind the site. I agree there could be some improvement in the future (for ex the header still looks like the old version), but overall it's definitely an order of magnitude better than the old design/layout. I like the increased white space and simplification of the home page too.
it's kinda creepy and weird how you do this kinda-joking ass-kissey stuff about Scott Guthrie all the time. Podcast, webcasts, etc there's always some comment by you where you're elevating him in some tounge and cheek way. I'm certain Scott would never cone out and say this to you but I've been in the corporate culture long enough to know that your each of your constant allusions to his "greatness" probably make him feel uncomfortable in some (maybe small) way. This is no different than you making some joke to your rich neighbor about how much money he has. Comments like this just tend to make people uncomfortable...
Regarding "Find a Host" I think it can be very helpful if you can add specifics for ASP.NET like : "Support Full-Trust applications" or "Support MVC" etc. Traditionally this always required a support call to the hoster to confirm the details. Once done, for a mISV like me, all we have to do is point the client to this page and they choose hosting (I can specify them to select one which support Full-Trust applications etc.
Incredibly chuffed to find a link to my ASP.NET Cometh post series on the front page of the new site. Thanks very much for that. It's going to be a lot more than ten posts by the time I've finished. A couple of questions for you though.
1. Can I send you a mugshot so it can be up against the link rather than the .NET wave?
2. Could I suggest adding Programming ASP.NET 3.5 to the list of webforms books and removing the old .NET 2.0 version that's further down the page?
Thanks again,
Dan Maharry
When trying to access the overview video it initially gave my an XML parsing error, then it loaded the page and the video didn't work. This is in Firefox. Also the page is not displayed properly.
I probably won't return to the site anytime soon, so this overview will never be seen by me. I think its important that for things where you are trying to get new users/developers that they work as you only get one chance. Hope it gets fixed eventually.
Also, the design of the website needs a lot of work. I see Microsoft as too large and essential to be worrying about inconsistent standards of design across products, but it would be nice and i'm sure they could pick up a few more users.
Cheers
But when I clicked on 'Get started' I was taken to a blank page.
This might just be for me :(
I will try again later
Murali
If this is Umbraco, ehm... better get your money back. Oh wait. Open source.
- The site is so slow I gave up. For now I am going to attribute it to probable high traffic from the curious. But the Who's Online section says 672 members and 0 guests. 672 is not a huge number. I am not signed in so why does it say 0 guests? Am I not considered a guest when I am not signed in? I don't believe all the current visitors are signed in.
- The 4 buttons are huge and take prime real estate above the fold for no good reason and pushes down the spotlight section much of it below the fold. Once one visits the site more than once, we know about the buttons. Make something big when it changes frequently. Buttons don't change.
- This is an old problem and many sites with forums suffer from it. Why when I am in a sub forum, the basic search function return results from ALL the forums. I am just interested in the forum I am in. I have to resort to using more search functions and click at least 4 times to filter down. What if I live in a forum? The site should remember my settings. Google's site advanced search has a save settings feature without even logging in.
Sorry but I am not impressed. With the very slow performance, the experience was agonizing.
The ads are lame, most of the other web frameworks don't use ads and they are open source.
While I'm sure the load is high, you guys aren't helping your cause by not following the most basics of web optimizations. You are loading 13 external javascript files, your "light" homepage is 400kb. You are serving a 170Kb css file (which is HUGE) and aren't even gzipping it....
SIMPLE AND TO THE POINT!
Glad to see the links to offsite content finally gone. Most of the time it seemed the off site articles were crap.
And I fully agree with Bellware on the similiarities with the RoR site. Are you going to follow RoR in terms of scalability as well? At least you are getting the important part right - the runtime. Do you really want to have a site that is as attractive as RoR? You could start by removing the annoying advertisements! RoR is open-source, and they don't need a huge section of the site dedicated to this nonsense to help cover hosting expenses. They also didn't weasel me out of $200 to get a "service pack" to Vista (also known as Windows 7). Care to elaborate?
And you should know that I don't need help finding a "hoser". Oh wait, that says hoster. Haha, strange brew. Hmmm, what's a hoster?! EPIC FAIL!
- I know it's hard, but there should be a C# and VB version of each video. I am a C# developer and sometimes I can follow on VB videos, but sometimes I find myself spending more time figuring out what something means than learning the actual topic of the video. This may be hard for large videos, but for 5-15 minute videos it could be possible right?
- The intro noise of every video has really hurt my ears for years. I don't know if it's just me, but the tone is too high and the volume is usually higher than the voice person doing the video. As I said, maybe is just me but there is something to consider for future videos
As for the site design comments above, this is a perfect example of why I hate web design - everyone's a critic but precious few could better in a way that addressed the entire audience, not just their particular perspective.
Good work, and keep the iterations and improvments coming!
Paul
The basic rules of Web Designers are always fulfilled:
1. when you change your site, 50% of your users will like it, the other 50% will be pissed off about the new design
2. you will always get lots of EPIC FAIL flames, no matter what you do :-)
Ignore the flamers, extract the criticism (between the LOLs and the EPIC FAILs), keep it in mind for your next iteration, and keep having fun :-)
Is it me or I've been noticing that Microsoft is again in Copy mode.
Widnows 7 Phone: no copy & paste, similar market place as apple, no multi tasking like iphone....etc..
ASP.NET following in the same direction as RubyOnRails website
Solution:
Host a competition where users/groups from all around the world will design the website. We the users will vote on the best design. Everyone wins! ... everyone except the person who received $20 from MS for creating this PUKE of a design.
I am a great fan of yours and I always love what you do. But I must say new asp.net design is good but its not futuristic.
ASP.NET is great technology itself you should go modern look. This look is good but not best. There should be new fresh look rather then blue everywhere and it should web3.0 standard
Also i have suggestion for forums. Please add voting section on forums just like stackoverflow guys are doing so people submitting answers can get what they deservers
Regards,
Jalpesh
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