beta.asp.net launches

I'm happy to announce that today we are officially launching https://beta.asp.net/, the new online community portal for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta and Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition.  This is an extension of the current www.asp.net site completely focused on ASP.NET 2.0 -- it incorporates a brand new design, look and feel, and back end infrastructure based on ASP.NET 2.0 that we will use to continue to improve the site moving forward.  After 2.0 RTM's the new look and feel will be rolled out across the entire site and you will continue to see innovation across the site.

Definitely let me know your feedback on the new look and feel, features, etc.  Can't wait to hear your thoughts!

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 25, 2005
  Tried the site's Home page against W3C validator http://validator.w3.org/
  
  Little disappointed with the results I got back. Especially given that there has been a lot of talk on the built-in xhtml/ compliant html output that VS2005 can generate/validate
• Anonymous
  May 26, 2005
  Everything on the new site that was either hand coded when we built the site or that makes use of the ASP.NET 2.0 server controls is XHTML compliant.
  
  The problem (from an XHTML standpoint) with the new site is that it has many legacy parts - i.e. we didn't build everything from scratch. The old site (the long standing www.asp.net) is far from XHTML compliant in part because it makes use of a database driven module system to fill various parts of a page. The folks entering the dynamic content (stored in the db) did not use XHTML compliant markup. The amount of effort to redo all of the markup for every piece of content that carried over into the new site was just something we couldn't do given our goals for making a better looking (at surface level) site available to the ASP.NET community in short order.
  
  It should be made clear though that we intend to 'migrate' the old content over time and hopefully we'll have a mostly (if not completely) XHTML compliant site by the time ASP.NET 2.0 RTMs for production in the fall.
• Anonymous
  July 19, 2005
  I'll echo Alex's comment and add one of my own: the team responsible for implementing the new design / XHTML/CSS templates has been doing a great job getting rid of legacy code where possible, and as Alex said much of the issue is the content which is pulled from a db. The original design templates (which I created) validate, and I have no doubt that the team at Telligent will have everything validating eventually.
  
  It should go without saying (though it often doesn't) that in any situation where the content is out of the direct control of the site producers, you are much more likely to have validation issues -- the point is that a site doesn't have to be 100% valid to be a success, especially when the content is pulled dynamically. What's more important is that beta.asp.net is a huge improvement on the surface and behind the scenes.