The shortcomings of GotDotNet

Craig Andera blogged about leaving GotDotNet, presumably its workspace feature, for SourceForge. The ASP.NET forum team also moved out of there recently. I'm surprised it took that long.

The shortcomings of the workspace feature didn't come even remotely as a surprise to me. GDN reeks of neglect, and it was in pretty poor shape in its first iteration, not to mention appears relatively unchanged since it debuted in 2001, or earlier. That's a real shame, because it was the first .NET community I really got active in. Even to this day, I know I've made more posts there than on www.asp.net. It had a great community in the early days.

I know I'm going to be called a hypocrite (considering how frequently I complain about feature-bloated forum software not making up for a lame community), but the site has always been in a pretty sad state of affairs. If you weren't frequently getting errors, the site was slower than Dubya trying to spell “nukeular.” It was pretty much not usable much of the time, and it doesn't matter how good your community is when the site is that technically poor.

The PM's and such started to get active on there and listen to feedback, only to disappear or change. One question that no one could answer was, why is GDN its own little kingdom, separate from the teams running www.asp.net and WindowsForms.net? That never made sense to me.

Then there was the whole technical side of the site. For something run by Microsoft, it was about as far from a good example of how to build stuff that you can find. Pick any page, especially the forum pages, and have a look at that viewstate in the source. Yikes!

What a bummer. It was a good idea executed very, very badly.