Rich Ersek's Blog

Take this with a grain of salt. I love the layout, and I'm sure it is a work in progress.

With that said, it doesn't remotely validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Hopefully that's just a matter if not being a priority in your redesign yet, and not a sign of life with ASP.NET 2.0.

I would think that the most-used areas of www.asp.net are the Forums and the Control Gallery. The new Community Server forums are really excellent now. I hope you guys can now make some new changes to the Control Gallery. I'm sure there are plenty of suggestions for it in the forums. A few things that come to mind:

-A new search page to make finding controls easier.
-An improved rating capability...since most controls seem to have no rating at all.
-I doubt you'll do this one, but it would be awesome if you could turn it into a control marketplace...then control developers could actually sell their controls directly from there. I say this because it takes a lot more work to setup a website to sell from, as well as including the ability to take credit card payments. Anyway, just an idea. As a control developer myself, I'd be willing to give up a few percent of my sales to Microsoft in order to have this ability.

Thanks for the feedback on Control Gallery. This is one of the next priorities on our list - I know it's long overdue. We're also going to be looking at improvements to the blog engine.

The control marketplace is an interesting idea - I'll have to give it some consideration. However, because we're primarily a product development team, it's difficult to dedicate a lot of resources to the website compared to larger groups like MSN. Besides the transactional aspects of a marketplace, I expect there would be some interesting legal hurdles to clear.

Chris - you're correct that we're a ways away from strict XHTML compliance. If you break down the issues, much of it has to do with the content engine we're currently using. We also had a more aggressive adherence with the original beta.asp.net site but we chose to back off from that for now. I'm not an expert in design by any stretch of the imagination but have learned a lot from this rollout in terms of the tradeoffs you need to make between compatibility, standards compliance and performance. As you say, it's a work in progress and we'll keep improving.

The site looks great!

> "because we're primarily a product development team, it's difficult to dedicate a lot of resources to the website"

Rich, need help from the MVP community? :-)

You mentioned web parts. Is there a place where I can drag them around and reorganize within "zones"?

If the MVPs want to do a project to create a prototype that would be great! It would also be an absolute must to have a solid plan backed with resources to support such a marketplace - fixing problems that might impact vendors, supporting customers and monitoring/maintaining the offerings to prevent misuse and ensure a good user experience. That's the area I think would require the most resources and that the MVPs and exteneded community would need to address - email me if you want to take it further.

I'd also be open to the idea of providng some kind of Microsoft support and linking from our site to a marketplace that was hosted independently by the community. I'm not committing anything here but I think that's an idea worth exploring.

-Rich

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