Just a status update would be nice

Over on his blog, Lance Hunt poses the question to Scott W. (and Telligent) about the asp.net weblogs and the status quo. As I've seen the blog engine formerly known as ".Text" grow into Community Server Blogs I've wondered on several occasions when asp.net weblogs was going to see an upgrade. (We use Community Server Blogs over at FAZR and it's served us well, btw). I like the newer features and skins.

If I remember correctly, when Rob Howard was on .NET Rocks! he was asked about this and his response was basically, "We haven't had the time". While I certainly understand what it's like to be busy - especially running your own company - my reaction to someone saying "we haven't had the time" is I think to myself, "you haven't made the time." Everyone chooses what to spend their time on. What you spend your time on is usually a matter of priority so - it seems that the asp.net weblogs are low on the priority list. (Which I can understand)

Now, I don't mean to sound ungrateful - I have enjoyed having an asp.net weblog for free and I am thankful for the hard work (and $) that's gone into providing this service to us. I honestly appreciate it. Having said that - I think a little help would go a long way. What's holding up moving the asp.net weblogs from .Text 0.95 to Community Server Blogs? If it's really a time issue - I'm sure the group of bloggers here are plenty technical enough to be able to lend a hand - or even do it themselves entirely if given access to. At this point, any news would be better than no news.

11 Comments

  • See my comment on Lance's post. I got an informal January 2006 from Rob at our user group meeting. It would be great to hear something official, even if it's "we hope to..."

  • Well last time I posted something about that (8 months ago I think) Scott was talking avbout July 2005. Now January 2006, 2008, doesn't make sense.

    I think if Scott don't have time, he should tryu to hand over the project to people witha bit of time ! (Not me please I have enough on my plate).

    I am sure a lot of competent people would be happy to help here.

    That's why community services and business are not usually good friends :-)

    Also I am not sure if we need the whole kaboodle which is CS actually. Too bloated too much stuff unecessary.

    Maybe just the new .Text engine inside CS, would be enough! Or radically move the whole stuff to another blog engine with more support and maintenance.

  • I just posted the following comment to Lance's post as well:



    It is our intention to upgrade the weblogs.asp.net blogs to Community Server 2.0 once we ship (which should be in December).



    The full answer is that weblogs.asp.net is very low in priority. Why? Lots of reasons but it mostly boils down to resources (people and software/hardware).



    I'm not making excuses but will give you an idea of why the site has not been upgraded. Telligent manages the asp.net site and you'll notice that on asp.net we advertise. We advertise to subsidize the cost of having development resources (used to build the next www.asp.net on ASP.NET 2.0 and upgrade the forums to Community Server among other things). Both the forums and www.asp.net run ads....weblogs.asp.net does not. Right now, weblogs.asp.net does nothing but cost money to operate (which we're happy to contine to support of course). It's not cheap either as weblogs.asp.net draws about the same amount of traffic as the whole of www.asp.net (so there are both bandwidth and server resources being used). These are not reasons in and of themselves for the upgrade to not take place but they are the reason that it has had such a low priority.



    There aren't any resources we can provide to migrate the posts to another blog. That's definitely unfortunate but it is true. Ironically, I believe it will be easier to migrate after we upgrade to CS 2.0.



    Additionally, while it might seem like a simple and logical solution to "just let the community do it" - it's not that simple. The weblogs.asp.net domain runs on two web servers and a database server that it shares with other *.asp.net sites. The logistics of being able to provide an adequate account for you to just do the technical work required would drive us to just do the upgrade ourselves. =) I'm not saying it couldn't be done but it would be much harder than just saying 'have at it guys'. There are a lot of implications to allowing external folks to have access to the machines/sites owned by Microsoft.



    It's not hard to just use blogs with Community Server. Have you seen blogs.msdn.com? What does Community Server bloat on that site?

  • Thanks for the information Alex - that answers some questions. I'm definitely looking forward to being upgraded to CS 2.0 and thanks for continuing to provide this blogging service here.



    I don't know about all the other people who have blogs here but - me personally - I wouldn't mind having ads on my blog if it helped you guys out.

  • The difference with blogs.msdn.com is that I can#t blog there, it's obnly for Microsoft employees!

    I hope I misunderstand, but it seems the idea is to push people doing their stuff elsewhere and close weblogs.asp.net. What a shame if it's true :-(

    And the problem with the bandwidth let me laugh. If Microsoft can't handle it who will??

    This is a community site and has a role as a role to play for Microsoft. So ads I don't mind, but the money collected should be controlled by the bloggers, not by Microsoft.

    And a thing seems to be very unclear, who's in charge here? Scott, Alex or whoever? Teligent or Microsoft?

  • Paschal, you said that CS was too bloated to be used here and I was pointing out that it could be used here and that it was not too bloated for blogging (using blogs.msdn.com as an example). I didn't say that you could blog there or it was an alternative.



    We don't want to push people elsewhere. At the same time, as I've already explained, we will make decisions about weblogs.asp.net based on resources. Hopefully everyone will hang on at least until we upgrade to CS 2.0.



    The bandwidth alone is not a problem. It is, however, a cost that someone has to pay. One could argue that Microsoft should allocate more money to this project but I think you are overestimating the value that weblogs.asp.net brings Microsoft.



    As I said in my original comment:



    "Telligent manages the asp.net site and you'll notice that on asp.net we advertise. We advertise to subsidize the cost of having development resources (used to build the next www.asp.net on ASP.NET 2.0 and upgrade the forums to Community Server among other things). "



    I thought it was pretty clear who is in charge. Telligent manages the day to day operations of all things *.asp.net. Microsoft obviously owns the domains and the content but they've delegated the work of maintaining the infrastcture, development, paying the bills, etc. to Telligent.



    Because Telligent is paying the bills for the site, Telligent would collect any monies gained from showing ads. That money would of course be used to continue to improve all things *.asp.net (like migrating from CS 2.0 to CS 2.1 down the road, etc.).

  • The strange thing Alex, and don't take that personal, is that you're coming out of the blue answering our questions. Why Scott is so silent? Who is part of the board to manage weblogs.asp.net? Who are you reharding weblogs.asp.net?

    It's not looking like a very transparent project anyway. But I stay here just because I can use it to express my opinion

  • I suppose I'm coming out of the blue only because you don't hang out on www.asp.net for forums.asp.net. I've been the Program Manager for all of *.asp.net since February. I've managed the creation of beta.asp.net and the upgrade of the old forums to Community Server since that time. Regardless, the work and management of *.asp.net is not done by a "board" or a single person - it's done by a team of people at Telligent.



    Don't worry about Scott. He's doing just fine and spends his time working on Community Server and managing that team of folks.

  • I am still here. This misconception is that I can read all of these blogs. If you have specific questions I can be contacted @ scottw at telligent dot com.



    The contact form on my blog still works, but generally gets bombarded with lots of request. Not really excuse for not getting back to people...but it does complicate things.



    My day to day responsibilities have shifted over the last year or so. Instead of doing all things .Text/weblogs.asp.net/CS myself, we now have various team members which are responsible for different tasks. In addition to being the PM on the www.asp.net work, Alex is also the lead PM on CS, so he is a great resource for questions related to the migration and management of this site.



    We have been targeting updating this site to the post 1.1 bits of CS. Based on customer feedback/etc we expanded what when went into our vNext which is why the targeted upgrade time for this site has been pushed back until January 2006 or so. While it is possible to upgrade this site now, the management “tax” on managing sites on intermediary builds is quite large and can be very error prone. Rob/ScottD and others still blog on this site…so trust me; we want it updated as soon as it is possible. From the outside looking in, I can understand that it looks like a simple task, but there is much more to the problem.



    HTH,

    Scott

  • Thanks for spending some time here answering our questions - Scott and Alex. I'm sure lots of the weblogs.asp.net bloggers are looking forward to the 2.0 CS update in January.

  • "The bandwidth alone is not a problem. It is, however, a cost that someone has to pay. One could argue that Microsoft should allocate more money to this project but I think you are overestimating the value that weblogs.asp.net brings Microsoft. "

    You're kidding, right?



    Do a google search on any .NET problem. 10 to 1 that on the first page you get there is at least 1 weblogs.asp.net page listed.



    Also, MS has one of the biggest pipes to the internet on the planet, last I heard it was several TB bandwidth. You're not going to sell me the idea that MS can't spend some bandwidth on a huge community resource for their .NET platform.

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