A look back at the ASP.NET site through the years

While writing up the release post for the new ASP.NET website, I started thinking about the site's changed over the years, and that lead me on a brief excursion through the Wayback Machine history of the ASP.NET home page.  Here are some highlights:

Prior to 2001, the site was owned by ASP Computer Products, who appear to have been marketing an External Pocket Print Server for Fast Ethernet. Sadly, I missed my opportunity to go see it at Comdex 2000.

The first ASP.NET related page available is in 2001, and it's pretty much just a splash page.

By 2002, the site had daily articles, Forums, Tutorials, a Control Gallery, and was advertising Web Matrix - the first one, built to help develop ASP.NET Web Forms.

2005 saw some big changes in November, for the release of Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0. I fondly remember that release - it was huge! I drove from San Diego to San Francisco to attend an early adopter training week, then spent a good year trying to get my company to buy into updating some of our sites to ASP.NET 2.0.

In 2007, there was an update which brought in the blue color as well as the rounded corners and gradients I was complaining about earlier.

After that, thing didn't change much until March 2010, our previous release.

And of course, our newest release just went live today, December 1, 2011.