Top 10 ASP.NET Resources (Continued)

5) ASPToday (www.asptoday.com): There is an extensive list of quality ASP.NET articles at this Wrox-branded site, because the authors are actually paid (quite well, in fact). Unfortunately, ASPToday became a paid subscription site last year. You’ll have to shell out $99 per year for its “Living Book” subscription, though it does offer a few free articles every month. Given the amount of time you can save through these articles, it might not be such a bad investment. The sister site to ASPToday is C#Today (www.csharptoday.com), which will cost you another $30 per year.

4) ASPFree (www.aspfree.com): If you’re not into paying subscription fees, this site might be for you. Given its name, I’d wager that subscription fees aren’t in its business plan. ASPFree has a lot of good ASP.NET articles, but what I really like is the fact that if you see something neat on the site, chances are there’s a link to download the source code and instructions to implement it yourself. This adds credibility to the code—especially because I know this is a fairly high-volume site.

3) .NET 247 (www.dotnet247.com): This site is a newcomer that has shot up my list of favorite .NET resources. It takes the unique and innovative approach of organizing the links to its content by the namespaces that they pertain to in the .NET Framework. If, for instance, you wanted to learn about the System.Net namespace, just click on the link and you get a nice list of abstracts and links to the articles and code (both on-site and off-site). The entire site was built using ASP.NET, which is also really neat. I see this site becoming a major hub in the .NET developer community.

2) ASPFriends (www.aspfriends.com): Formerly known as ASPLists, this site allows you to subscribe to targeted e-mail lists. If you have never joined an e-mail list before, they are much more helpful than posting questions to newsgroups. The best part about ASPFriends is that its lists are monitored by actual members of the actual .NET development team, allowing you to get answers to your questions directly from the source. They are also moderated to ensure that the subject matter for each list stays on point.

1) 123aspx (www.123aspx.com): This is my favorite ASP.NET resource by far. It has been around since the beginning of ASP.NET, so it has an enormous index of ASP.NET content, located on hundreds of different Web sites. If it’s out there, chances are you can find it through this site. Also, the search box works great (a pet peeve of mine, as you can tell).

You’ll notice I didn’t list any of the sites operated by Microsoft. I saved them for a different list altogether:

ASP.NET (www.asp.net): This is the official Microsoft home page for ASP.NET. It is essentially a portal that points you to where you can download the ASP.NET SDK, as well as related books and Web sites.