GotDotNet? Not Anymore, You Don't
Microsoft's web property GotDotNet will be completely shut down and phased out of existence by June 19, 2007. From the GotDotNet homepage:
Microsoft will be phasing out the GotDotNet site by July 2007.
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Microsoft will phase out all GotDotNet functionality by July 2007. We will phase out features according to the schedule below. During the phase-out we will ensure that requests for features or pages that are no longer available will render enough information for you to understand what has changed. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact the GotDotNet Support team.
We are phasing out GotDotNet for the following reasons:
Microsoft wants to eliminate redundant functionality between GotDotNet and other community resources provided by Microsoft
Traffic and usage of GotDotNet features has significantly decreased over the last six months
Microsoft wants to reinvest the resources currently used for GotDotNet in new and better community features for our customers |
Phase Out Schedule
The GotDotNet phase out will be carried out in phases according the following timetable:
| February 20 |
Partners, Resource Center, Microsoft Tools |
| March 20 |
Private workspaces, Team pages, Message Boards |
| April 24 |
GDN CodeGallery (projected date) |
| May 22 |
GDN User Samples (projected date) |
| June 19 |
GDN Workspaces (projected date) |
I understand how Microsoft doesn't want to dedicate any resources to a “dead site,” but why kill the site altogether? Couldn't they just stop new workspaces from being opened, stop new messageboard posts, stop new user samples from being submitted, and so on, but leave the existing pages up and available? There are countless messageboard posts, user samples, articles, and other valuable content that Microsoft is just throwing away. (The messageboard at the skmMenu workspace, for example, has over 1,000 messageboard posts that will evaporate come June 19.)
Back in the COM days (and now in the Web Services sphere), developers harped on public interfaces exposed by a COM component or a Web service endpoint, and how these interfaces represented a contract that should never be broken. Doesn't a URL constitute a public interface into a web application? Once a URL is public, shouldn't that URL always work? My opinion is that it should. For example, I have DataGrid FAQs up at DataWebControls.com, but since the advent of ASP.NET 2.0 the DataGrid has been relegated to the dustbin of web technology. Sure, there are still people doing ASP.NET 1.x (including yours truly), but as time marches on, this will become less important. Yet I plan to keep these FAQs there in perpetuity because once a URL is public and has been put out there for the world to consume, it is rude (and, dare I say, wrong) to remove it.
Hopefully Microsoft will decide to let GDN live on, if just as its existing content. Failure to do so not only removes useful content from the Internet, but also sends a rather innocuous message to users of CodePlex, Microsoft's GDN successor: “One day we might decide to nuke this site and your projects, messages, and contributions.”