Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

On the Stove

So, what’s cooking for the period between Orcas and Hawaii? All Visual Studio .NET releases have been named after islands in Puget Sound, so the choice of Hawaii may indicate that the team will stretch itself further in the next few years. Alternatively, it may simply indicate that they all wish Building 42 could be located on a beach in Maui.

Richer Community Experiences

Wherever they may be, we, as part of a community of several million .NET developers, will continue to be spread out around the world, joined through the Internet at community sites such as http://www.asp.net and http://www.aspinsiders.com. Microsoft can’t spread itself so thin as to answer every question on every forum (there are many MVPs and excellent programmers out there to help out besides those in Redmond), but it has committed itself to improving and giving responses to 99% of all the questions on http://forums.microsoft.com and http://forums.asp.net.

Its intention, presumably, is to make its own sites the number one resource for getting your questions answered. The enabling of community contributions to the MSDN Library website through the Community Content and Click to Rate and Give Feedback buttons (shown in Figure 21-2), added to the top of all its content pages, is also a precursor of things to come. Microsoft wants MSDN to be a community platform for developers to contribute to as well as to find information.

Figure 21-2. MSDN’s community contribution buttons

A standalone Wiki will also be ...