What's New

Planned System Maintenance - Saturday November 14, 2009 03:00 AM - 05:30 AM EST (GMT - 5)

tmorton — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:50:59 GMT

Summary:

The ASP.NET servers will be undergoing routine maintenance. This will result in a short period of downtime for the entire ASP.NET website, as described below.

Maintenance Start:

Saturday November 14, 2009 03:00 AM EDT (GMT - 4)

Maintenance End:

Saturday November 14, 2009 05:30 AM EDT (GMT - 4)

Impact:

During this 2.5 hour maintenance window there will be 3 brief periods of downtime, estimated to be about 10 minutes, where users will experience trouble accessing the entire ASP.NET website.

Next Communication:

This thread will be updated on Saturday, sometime after the maintenance is complete.

Change in URL for NNTP access

tmorton — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:29:20 GMT

The URL for accessing the ASP.NET Forums through NNTP is now:

news://nntp-forums.asp.net

You can continue to use the same ASP.NET site login credentials and any RFC compliant news reader, such as Outlook Express, to connect to, browse, read, reply, and post either online or offline. Instructions for NNTP setup can be found here.

Blog posts will now be accepted as Article of the Day

tmorton — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:36:24 GMT

On Friday 9/25/2009 we loosened the requirements for Article of the Day a bit. We still are looking for high-quality content, and to that end we will now accept blog posts.

You can view the updated requirements here: http://www.asp.net/community/articles/SubmitArticle.aspx. And for reference, I have listed them below:

The article must be directly relevant to ASP.NET. An article concerning general .NET development or general web development will not be accepted.
The article must be freely accessible to the public. Pay-for-access articles will not be accepted.
The article must be of high technical quality. An article that does not follow recommended practices will not be accepted.
The article must be of high editorial quality. An article marked by poor spelling, grammar, or style will not be accepted.
Articles which are little more than annotated code snippets will not be accepted. Similarly, articles which are little more than a series of images with very little written content and explanation will not be accepted.
An Article may be a weblog entry, as long as it meets the rest of the guidelines.
Preference is given to recent articles. Articles more than 1 year old are not likely to be accepted.

Additionally, we are now sending out email notifications for the following 3 events:

We have received your submission
We have approved (or declined) your submission
Your submission is now live on the site

(We had already been sending out email notifications for the first 2 events. The third one is new.)

Thanks to all for your submissions!

Planned System Maintenance - Saturday October 17, 2009 03:00 AM - 07:00 AM EDT (GMT - 4)

tmorton — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:48:05 GMT

Summary:

The ASP.NET servers will be undergoing routine maintenance. This will result in a short period of downtime for the entire ASP.NET website, as described below.

Maintenance Start:

Saturday October 17, 2009 03:00 AM EDT (GMT - 4)

Maintenance End:

Saturday October 17, 2009 07:00 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

Impact:

During this 4 hour maintenance window there will be a brief period of downtime, estimated to be about 15 minutes, where users will experience trouble accessing the entire ASP.NET website.

Next Communication:

This thread will be updated on Saturday, sometime after the maintenance is complete.

Email notifications temporarily suspended

tmorton — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:11:18 GMT

We have suspended the email notifications while we rebuild the search index. Notifications are being queued, and will be sent out once the service is turned back on. We apologize for any inconvenience this will cause.

Change in CDN origin tonight - 7:00 PM EDT(GMT-4)

tmorton — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:09:05 GMT

We are making a change tonight in the CDN origin to point to a new IP address. This change should be completely transparent to all site visitors, and there should be no downtime. We will be monitoring the site for issues, and will update this thread if any are found. The CDN is used for static content, so the most likely symptoms of problems would be missing avatars, images or javascript files.

Planned System Maintenance - Monday September 28, 2009 23:00 PM - 23:30 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

tmorton — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:19:59 GMT

Summary:

One of the ASP.NET servers will again be undergoing routine maintenance. This will result in a short period of downtime for some of the features of the ASP.NET website, as described below.

Maintenance Start:

Monday September 28, 2009 23:00 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

Maintenance End:

Monday September 28, 2009 23:30 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

Impact:

There will be an approximate 5 minute period during the 30 minute maintenance window where users may experience trouble accessing the following:

http://wiki.asp.net
AJAX Control Toolkit tutorial demos (e.g. http://www.asp.net/learn/Ajax-Control-Toolkit/tutorial-39-cs.aspx)

These should return to full accessibility once the maintenance is complete.

The ASP.NET Forums, Weblogs, Quickstarts, and the rest of the ASP.NET website will be unaffected.

Next Communication:

This thread will be updated when this maintenance is complete.

Monday September 28, 2009 23:00 PM

Forums.asp.net updates for 9/24/2009

tmessbauer — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:15:30 GMT

The following were just deployed with regard to forums performance.

CDN for css, js, and css related images
CSS and JS consolidation.
Fix for issues with a specific thread where a username was causing issues with a Community Server stored procedure.

There was a short hiccup (near 6:30p Central Time - US) while a stored procedure was updated and a corresponding library was updated. Site response may have been affected in a 5 minute window near that time.

If you are experiencing any issues with the site following this deployment, please reply here. If you notice performance increase, please let us know that as well.

Thank you

Planned System Maintenance - Friday September 18, 2009 21:00 PM - 21:30 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

tmorton — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:25:28 GMT

Summary:

One of the ASP.NET servers will again be undergoing routine maintenance. This will result in a short period of downtime for some of the features of the ASP.NET website, as described below.

Maintenance Start:

Friday September 18, 2009 21:00 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

Maintenance End:

Friday September 18, 2009 21:30 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

Impact:

There will be an approximate 5 minute period during the 30 minute maintenance window where users may experience trouble accessing the following:

http://wiki.asp.net
AJAX Control Toolkit tutorial demos (e.g. http://www.asp.net/learn/Ajax-Control-Toolkit/tutorial-39-cs.aspx)

These should return to full accessibility once the maintenance is complete.

The ASP.NET Forums, Weblogs, Quickstarts, and the rest of the ASP.NET website will be unaffected.

Next Communication:

This thread will be updated when this maintenance is complete.

Planned System Maintenance - Thursday September 17, 2009 21:00 PM - 21:30 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

tmorton — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 19:01:00 GMT

Planned System Maintenance

Summary:

One of the ASP.NET servers will be undergoing routine maintenance. This will result in a short period of downtime for some of the features of the ASP.NET website, as described below.

Maintenance Start:

Thursday September 17, 2009 21:00 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

Maintenance End:

Thursday September 17, 2009 21:30 PM EDT (GMT - 4)

Impact:

There will be an approximate 5 minute period during the 30 minute maintenance window where users may experience trouble accessing the following:

http://wiki.asp.net
AJAX Control Toolkit tutorial demos (e.g. http://www.asp.net/learn/Ajax-Control-Toolkit/tutorial-39-cs.aspx)

These should return to full accessibility once the maintenance is complete.

The ASP.NET Forums, Weblogs, Quickstarts, and the rest of the ASP.NET website will be unaffected.

Next Communication:

This thread will be updated when this maintenance is complete.

forums and www updated to use CDN

tmessbauer — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:59:31 GMT

Forums.asp.net and www.asp.net are both updated to use CDN to serve images. This is release #1 of the CDN work. The next release related to CDN will integrate further. There are some server side updates coming in next release related to optimizing data binding and wrapping the community server data providers for better throughput and simpler data binding.

I hope you enjoy. :)

Reputation database update - 8/28/2009 1pm US Central Time

tmessbauer — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:09:38 GMT

The database for the reputation system had some locking optimizations applied. This may help the new post response time. The legacy reputation system's database was missing lock hints for some critical items.

Please post back here if you see any new reputation issues.

Forums Deployment - August 19, 2009

tmorton — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:54:55 GMT

This afternoon we deployed a new build of the ASP.NET Forums. This new build includes:

Use client-side binding for the ASP.NET Forums landing page
Remove inline scripts for community recognition diamonds
Delayed ad loading for all forums pages
Revamp all forums ads to use the ad handler vs static files
Display community recognition points consistently with a comma for the thousands separator
Correct Featured Ad rendering issue in Chrome
Remove Personalize options from the Shortcuts menu since this functionality was not working (settings were not being respected on the Forums landing page)
Remove links to expand and collapse the forum groups on Forums landing page since this functionality was not working (state not persisting across page refreshes or logins)

Short outage this evening

tmorton — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:16:22 GMT

We will be making some infrastructure updates tonight, starting at 7:00 PM EDT (GMT-4). We anticipate that there will be a period of site inaccessability for Silverlight.NET, ASP.NET, WindowsClient.NET, and IIS.NET for no more than 5 minutes, at approximately 7:15 PM EDT (GMT-4), but that window could vary. The email notification service may be out for a period tonight as well.

Thank you as we continue to incrementally improve the site's performance, functionality, and reliability.

User avatars are currently disabled

tmorton — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:52:23 GMT

As we deal with an issue on an overtaxed database, we have turned off the display of user avatars on the site. Once we have completed some backend work with the database servers we will turn these back on; this should be in a day or 2. Until that point, everyone will be showing the default avatar.

Windows Live ID authentication integration

tmorton — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:15:59 GMT

Tonight we are deploying Windows Live ID authentication integration across the ASP.NET website. You might notice some slowness or intermittent errors on the site as we get the pieces into place. Once this is complete, you will be able to associate your website account to your Windows Live ID, and then use Windows Live ID to log into the site.

We've put together a FAQ here: Using Windows Live ID with this site.

Updated Text Editor

tmorton — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:26:12 GMT

Tonight we updated the text editor being used on the site. We moved from Tiny MCE 2.0 to Tiny MCE 3.0. Those of you who have chosen the "Standard Editor" or "Advanced Editor" option in your profile should find that the editor toolbar will now appear across all browsers. (Previously it would only appear in IE and FireFox.)

The source code plugin we had been using was not compatible with Tiny MCE 3, so we are now using version 1.5 of Alex Gorbatchev's SyntaxHighlighter. You will notice some new formatting of source code which is inserted using the "Insert Code" icon in the editor's toolbar. You will also seem a few options to "view plain", "copy to clipboard", and "print".

We will probably have a few adjustments to make regarding these additional options, but we were eager to get the Tiny MCE 3 update onto the site so that all browsers could have the RTE experience.

Tonight's update should address all known issues with the editor experience:

No editor toolbar appears in Chrome
No editor toolbar appears in Safari
No editor toolbar appears in Opera
C# with slashes in string is formatted like a comment
VB with single quotes in string is formatted like a comment
C# with HTML markup in string is not formatted correctly
C# generics are not formatted correctly
Pound sign (#) in HREF attribute does not appear
"expressions )" results in BLOCKED EXPRESSION being displayed
Pasting from Word presents Word markup junk as part of the post

For reference, you can see samples of each of these fixes in this test thread: http://forums.asp.net/t/1437326.aspx

http://alexgorbatchev.com/wiki/SyntaxHighlighter:Versions

You aren't missing any core functionality, so if you have it working to your satisfaction and has everything you need, i'd say it's not worth the effort upgrading just the sake of it.

Please note that this update will not affect the appearance of existing code snippets in forum posts.

FAQ: Using Windows Live ID with this site

tmorton — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:00:59 GMT

Using Windows Live ID with this site

Simplify your sign in

Create your sign in credentials (e-mail and password) once, then use them everywhere on the Windows Live ID service. You can even set the site to remember your credentials for you!

What is Windows Live ID?

Refer to this article.

Do I have to register with a Windows Live ID account?

Yes. If you are a new user to the Microsoft Communities sites (asp.net, silverlight.net, windowsclient.net, and iis.net), you MUST register using a Windows Live ID. To get started with the registration process, please click here.

Can I still use my existing asp.net website account to login?

Yes. If you already have an asp.net website account, you can still login with your existing credentials. Once you have associated your existing asp.net website account to your Windows Live ID, we do recommend that you use the Windows Live ID to log in, so that you have one less set of login credentials to manage.

I cannot change my Windows Live ID password in my "Profile". How do I change my Windows Live ID password?

You cannot change your password in the "Edit Profile" section of this site. You can change or reset your Windows Live ID password here.

I cannot remember my Windows Live ID password, how can I log in?

You can change or reset your Windows Live ID password here.

If l log into this site with Windows Live ID, will I automatically be logged into the other Microsoft Community sites?

No. The Windows Live ID authentication cookie is domain-specific, which means the context of your login is only available to the current site your are on. However, you can use the SAME Windows Live ID and password across any site that accepts Windows Live ID. Additionally, if you select the options "Remember me on this computer" and "Remember my password" on the initial login screen you will not have to enter your login credentials on your future visits to that specific web site (until you clear your cookies).

Is it possible to use a different Windows Live ID than the one I registered with?

Yes. If you would like to use a different Windows Live ID on this site, please submit your request via the site's feedback form and we can dis-associate your Windows Live ID from your asp.net website membership implementation. Once you've received a reply from us, you can then use the "Join" functionality to associate your username/display name with your intended Windows Live ID.

My question is not answered here

If you still have questions about using Windows Live ID with this site, please use the Feedback on this website forum or the site's feedback form to ask your question, and we will help you.

ASP.NET Forums outage this morning

tmorton — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:26:24 GMT

For those that noticed and were concerned, the ASP.NET and IIS.NET forums experienced a 36 minute outage this morning, from 11:24 AM to 12:01 PM EDT (GMT-4), due to a back end problem with one of the SQL Servers. This issue is now resolved and the forums are back up and running.

Reindexing the ASP.NET Forums content

tmorton — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:45:52 GMT

We are currently rebuilding the search indexes for the ASP.NET Forums content. During this reindexing time period, your search results will only include the posts that have been reindexed up to that point. Content is being indexed in reverse chronological order, so that the newer posts are being indexed before the older posts. We expect this process to take up to 2 days, and I will update this post when the reindexing is complete.

Update 6/18/2009 10:30 AM (GMT-4) - this work is nearly complete. The reindexing is done and we are working on optimizations.

"Report abuse" has been renamed to "Alert Moderators"

tmorton — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 23:22:54 GMT

Each post in the ASP.NET forums contains a link you can use to report a problem with a post or a thread. Previously this link was named "Report abuse", but it has now been renamed to "Alert Moderators" to more accurately reflect its function.

Please click the Alert Moderators link to let the moderation team know about posts that are offensive, off-topic, duplicate, spam, or otherwise against the site's Terms of Use.

Server Maintenance - Saturday June 13, 2009 03:00 AM - 07:00 AM EDT (GMT - 4)

tmorton — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:16:39 GMT

The ASP.NET servers will be undergoing routine maintenance on Saturday June 13, 2009 03:00 AM - 07:00 AM EDT (GMT - 4). You can expect slow response time intermittently during that period.

Removal of 16x16 avatars from the Last Post column

tmorton — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:16:30 GMT

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. In our ongoing effort to address performance issues, we've removed the 16x16 avatars from the "Last Post" column on pages that contain lists of forums or lists of threads.

Server Maintenance - Saturday May 16, 2009 03:30 AM - 04:30 AM EDT (GMT -4)

tmorton — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:47:09 GMT

The ASP.NET servers will be undergoing routine maintenance on Saturday May 16, 2009 03:30 AM - 04:30 AM EDT (GMT -4). You can expect slow to zero response time intermittently at that time.

Site management and development transitioning from Telligent to Neudesic

tmorton — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:00:30 GMT

Hi all,

For the last 4 years Microsoft and Telligent have cooperatively worked together on building the popular www.asp.net, www.iis.net, www.silverlight.net, www.windowsclient.net community sites. Telligent is changing its direction to focus more on building and servicing our flagship product: Community Server. Microsoft and Telligent have mutually agreed to transition Telligent’s responsibilities to Neudesic, who is better suited for the day-to-day operations of these sites.

We've been working on this transition since August 1, and it will be complete on October 1. On that day Telligent is officially handing over the reins of the above 4 sites to Neudesic. The sites will continue to leverage Community Server. The community is fortunate to have Neudesic taking over the management and development of this site and the others.

Jay Esguerra (username JayNeu) is my replacement here on the ASP.NET website (as well as the Silverlight.NET site). He'll be keeping tabs on the site feedback and ensuring that things run smoothly.

Regards,
Terri