I work with the ASP.NET team to coordinate some of the content for this site. We're always interested to hear what you like and don't like about the site, what you'd like to see more of, etc. Thoughts?
Can we have support and out of band releases for asp.net mvc without having to go through connect or partner support, which are both to be honest, utter shit?
Also can you get the API right and leave it right so we don't have to piss around for a week with our container and testing environment.
And finally, can you give us something better than razor which has a parser that isn't made of broken twigs and has proper separation of content and programming language (its horrid sorry). Jinja2/django/golang templates FTW.
Oh and sort out SQL 2012 licensing. It's going to cost us £768,000 to upgrade out kit from 2008 to 2012. Postgres migration is an order of magnitude cheaper.
I'm coming from a large asp.net mvc project and its not pleasant, sorry. Welcome to Microsoft centric development!
Content on the web site is pretty good though.
Depending on the kind of support you're looking for, the discussions and issues on CodePlex may help as well. Otherwise, there's community support (often including ASP.NET team members) in the following places: http://forums.asp.net/1146.aspx/1?MVC http://stackoverflow.com/ http://jabbr.net/#/rooms/aspnetmvc
There are some other view engines available if you don't like Razor. Since you mentioned Django, I'm guessing you've looked at NDjango(http://ndjango.org/index.php?title=NDjango_Home). Another one I've been keeping an eye on is Parrot (http://thisisparrot.com/) - still in development, but I really like the syntax.
After that it got kinda ranty so not sure if I missed some other questions.
We've looked at NDjango, but it's based on F# and as we well know, unless a product is a mainstream MS platform then it's liable to go out of the window on a whim or is shrouded constantly with uncertainty (choke silverlight, original workflow foundation, XNA? etc).
Sorry if this is rather critical and slightly ranty, but I'm slightly pissed off with maintaining this mess.
It's crisp concise and fast.
Positives --------- The articles posted on your site are top notch. For eg: In the page I see now, I wanted a beginner article on the latest TypeScript buzz, it's there. The WebAPI and Rosyln were fun to read, so was the MVC with TDD and many more articles listed.
Negatives --------- Someone has mentioned this in a comment here, and I do it again. Why don't we have a community section for Azure, Windows Apps and so on? I find information from the community much easier to understand and practical and makes up for the incomplete MVC and WebAPI documentation. The same goes for other technologies as well.
Is anyone listening?
I do know that the Azure site team's looking at expanding community content. They've contacted me to ask about how we handle the community info on the site home page. In case you're interested, here's the overview: http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2011/06/22/the-asp-...