The idea of this began a very long time ago although actually coding began around October of 2001.

I was always very interested in building a community site and as a Classic ASP developer what a better way to learn a new language than to build your own application. I got my hands dirty playing around with C# in the early days with the .Net beta releases. I first began absorbing the code base of PetShop application, making simple extensions to ensure I understood the architecture.

The site was continously being modified and rewritten as my skills progressed until CSharpFriends 'go-live' date of April 4th 2002. CSharpFriend was alive and the .Net community responded. I realized that my ADSL home connection was not going to be able to handle the traffic at its current growth so I transfered my hosting to a dedicated server (Dual XEON Server).

What powers CSharpFriends?

 CSharpFriends is powered by a Dual CPU, Dual Hard Drive Server sporting 1 GIG of RAM.

The Code

We are running on a Windows 2003 system with .Net SDK installed. As you would expect, the code base does not contain any visual basic (100% C#). The entire site consists of thousands of lines of code using code behind and custom controls for all the major modules of the site. The advantage of codebehind is during deployment I simply drop the 168kb dll into the bin directory and upload the .aspx pages and images.

The backend is handled by a SQL Server 2000 box. The database currently consists of 26 tables, 70 stored procedures and a few batch jobs that handle the member points system module. The site was designed using a 3-tier approach using classes, custom controls and the datbase backend.

If you have any more questions I try and answer all the emails I receive. If you have any technical questions I would advise that you post your queries on the forums. You can reach me at admin@csharpfriends.com.

Happy Coding!