What are the AspAdvice Lists?

The AspAdvice Lists are a place where anyone in the ASP/ASP.NET community can receive free assistance from other members of the community (often times the community's top experts and Microsoft product team members themselves!). The AspAdvice Lists are completely email and newsgroup based from an interface standpoint. We moderate every list so that spam and other useless messages never show in your inbox!

Who made all of these pages and who runs the AspAdvice Lists?

In late 2002, long time community ASPFriends.com was shut down, leaving thousands of users in the lurch. The ASP.NET team and many members of that community came to AspAdvice looking for a new list-based community.

Alex Lowe, one of the leaders of the defunct lists, took up the task of building AspAdvice's lists, with the help of Scott Watermasysk. The AspAdvice domain name was bought by AspAdvice owner Steven Smith because we couldn't use @aspalliance.com for the lists since these were already in use for our email purposes (we could have used lists.aspalliance.com or something, but Steve didn't want to use a three-level domain for the email addresses).

Alex and Scott, with the help of many volunteers, manage the AspAdvice lists on a day-to-day basis.

What is the technical infrastructure of the AspAdvice Lists?

The AspAdvice Lists run on a server at the world's greatest web host (Orcsweb.com) using the Lyris List Manager software. The site itself was written entirely using C# (in about 4 weeks) and, at the moment, the lines of code runs over 10,000. The site is hosted on the AspAdvice.com web server while the Lyris database (running SQL Server 2000) resides on a server at Orcsweb.com. At some point, we intend to open source the entire site as an application for others to learn from, adapt, and make their own.

Who pays for all of this?

AspAdvice covers the costs of the lists as part of its hosting plan from ORCSWeb (the best hosts we've ever had). Our plan is to create a sponsorship and advertising system in the coming months to help cover the costs of hosting, managing, moderating, and developing the lists.

What's next for AspAdvice Lists?

Well, soon we will be opening a host of regional and international lists for languages such as Italian, Dutch, etc.  If there are lists you would like to see added to the listserve then please send us an email. We also intend to build a richer set of management tools to allow you more flexibility with how you interact with the AspAdvice Lists. For example, we would like to port the ASP.NET Forums interface to the AspAdvice Lists so list members could choose between email, newsgroup, and forum access.

How will AspAdvice Lists benefit the ASP/ASP.NET community?

Well, aside from providing free email based technical support, we are attempting to form an advisory board that will help us ensure that the AspAdvice Lists provide as much benefit to the community as possible. If you are interested in finding out more about the advisory board or would like to volunteer your time or services then please email Alex.