What are other ASP.NET web applications that are as well done as StackOverflow?

Question

It's my understanding that StackOverflow (SO) was built using ASP.NET. What surprised me is it's so well designed and well implemented. Without knowing much about the internals of SO, here are my observations and educated guesses:

1. SO appears to be highly scalable.
2. URLs in SO are friendly.
3. It appears that SO does not contain a bunch of controls as most ASP.NET apps I've seen.
4. Judiciously and effectively use of Ajax requests, opacity animation, etc. Viewing source tells me SO is using jQuery.
5. SO runs on all major browsers (that I've used and this list includes IE, FF, Chrome, Opera).

Edit: 6. Comet-like feature: As you type your answer, if there is any other answer posted, you get the notification. If you choose to load it, of course only a partial page refresh is done and your answer remain intact. Have yet to see this in any other ASP.NET app.

So my questions:

• What are other ASP.NET web applications that are as well done as StackOverflow and what are their features that you like?
• Can you share about some more details about SO, for example is SO built using ASP.NET MVC or something else?

Answer 1

SO was build with ASP.NET MVC. Jeff hired good developers, had a good vision, and ran his screens through a real designer.

Answer 2

SO is built using ASP.NET MVC as explained by Jeff Atwood and his team in this podcast organised by Scott Hanselman

Listening to the podcast would be worthwhile.

One surprising element about SO which was revealed in the podcast is that SO runs on a single server (IIS & SQL Server). I was surprised by this.

Answer 3

Myspace.com uses ASP.net, which proves the scalability of the platform in general. You can also learn a lot about stackoverflow itself from reading the stackoverflow blog and listening to the stackoverflow podcasts.

Answer 4

Many of the things you point out about are actually due to the use of ASP.NET MVC. Pretty URLs come out of the box, non-standard controls, well nothing comes out of the box with MVC so you have to reinvent everything :), and finally the AJAX is pretty much a requirement for ASP.NET MVC if you want to do anything intelligent with it.

ASP.NET MVC alone does not account for the things which makes StackOverflow truly successful that's all down to the idea, execution, and the fact that Jeff and Joel combined garners a huge following on the net.

Answer 5

Orkut.com - A social networking site by google uses ASP.NET

Answer 6

ASP.NET Forms allows developers to build UIs in much the same way as .NET Windows Forms.

The whole idea was that a developer that knew how to build a 'Fat Client' Windows form could transfer those skills to ASP.NET forms. ASP.NET forms even allowed developers to pretty much put code on the same set of control events. The developer was sheilded from having to have any knowledge of HTML, HTTP, Javascript etc.

Unfortunately this resulted in large POSTs containing monster viewstate being generated frequently and hence a poor user experience. This is what has given ASP.NET a bad rep. In reality its the original ASP.NET Forms that should have the bad rep.

ASP.NET MVC, amoungst other things, embraces the nature of HTTP rather than trying to hide it. AJAX and JQuery are also features of MVC which add to the overall result being better.

That said having a great tool is useless without great vision, design and skill, the SO team clearly have those in abundance.

Answer 7

You can also learn quite a lot about the development, planning(!), etc in the two HanselMinutes podcasts on SO:

• StackOverflow uses ASP.NET MVC - Jeff Atwood and his technical team
• Behind the Scenes - StackOverflow and Jeff Atwood - Part 2

Available in numerous audio formats, as well as transcribed.

Answer 8

ASP.NET creates websites limited only by the talent of the developers.

The same can be said for virtually any framework.

That said, Windows Server/IIS/.NET is a hugely scalable concept, as we serve far far more traffic than SO on a ASP.NET site (Then again, we have 32 servers).

Answer 9

As mentioned in one of the answers here, myspace.com uses ASP.NET (as far as I know it was written in ColdFusion and used BlueDragon for .NET).

One other site is plentyoffish.com (60M hits per day).

If you want to read more about scalability see http://highscalability.com