Introducing the .NET Tech Community Forums
.NET is a unified platform enabling developers to build world class applications across operating systems and platforms. There is a global community of millions of developers building apps with .NET and helping other developers get started with .NET. Last year, we started our journey in unifying .NET communities when it comes to discussions and getting technical help. First, we launched Microsoft Q&A for .NET, a home for technical questions and answers for .NET. This hub has seen huge growth month over month in the number of visitors, questions, and answers from the community and Microsoft employees. We want to thank everyone for being so involved in Q&A which has led to over 80% of questions being answered every month!
We aren’t done yet, as we have heard feedback from our developer community that a space is needed to have more interactions beyond Q&A. You have told us you are looking for a dedicated forum where you have technical discussions, talk about best practices, chat about new releases, and share how-to guidance. That is why we are pleased to announce the .NET Tech Community Forums for all .NET developer topics & discussions!
Tech Community Features
No matter if you are a web developer, mobile & desktop developer, into microservices, data, machine learning, or just getting started, there is a discussion space for you! Simply join the .NET tech community, pick a discussion space, start a new discussion, and collaborate with other .NET developers!
Follow Topics
Every topic on the .NET Tech Community can be followed so you can get updates through e-mail, RSS feeds, or on your tech community home page.
Join more communities
The best part of the .NET Tech Community is that it is part of the entire Microsoft Tech Community. There are a plethora of product and special topic community hubs that you can join, follow, and start discussions on.
Build your profile and earn achievements
Who doesn’t like getting achievements and kudos for helping out the community and discussing your favorite topics!
The new .NET Tech Community will live side-by-side Microsoft Q&A:
- Microsoft Q&A for .NET – for your technical questions and support
- .NET Tech Community – for technical discussions, how-to, and more.
The launch of both Tech Community and Q&A help align with all products throughout Microsoft for developers including Azure, Teams, Office, and more that you will find on both platforms.
Check out the .NET Tech Community today!
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13 comments
What? Why do we need yet another discussion forum? Earlier this year the MSDN Forums were moved to the Microsoft Q&A forums and everybody was told to post there in a “Stack Overflow”-ish forum. Now there is yet another forum to have Q&A questions.
What happens to the existing discussions on Q&A? Should devs now be encouraged to post over on this new site rather than the (still new) Q&A forums? How is this going to be a better solution than all those years where the MSDN Forums were separate from the ASP.NET Forums and yet people cross posted on both?
.NET is huge. Should questions related to calling Azure in C# be in this new forum or over in the Q&A forums? What about Azure DevOps that is not even supported in Q&A yet? Oftentimes a question crosses more than just .NET. For example a web app using Angular is going to cover .NET, Angular, web dev and probably some DB stuff. A unified forum doesn’t have issues like this but splintering questions across multiple sites does.
This is why I crossed my eyes when I read “we have heard feedback from our developer community that a space is needed”.
Q&A is not going away, it lives side by side the Tech Community forums and discussion space. This is similar to other products such as Azure, Office, Surface Duo, etc.
Q&A is for getting your questions answers and Tech Community is for discussions on topics.
That may be your goal but I doubt it’ll happen that way. Folks go to Q&A for discussions as much as questions. Whichever one happens to pull up in search first (or they bookmark) is where they will post questions and discussions.
I’m still having a hard time understanding the technical difference between the two. Webster defines a discussion as “consideration of a question in open and usually informal debate”. Discussions start with a question and then people provide feedback (answers). Discussions (comments) ensue until the OP gets the feedback (answer) they are most comfortable with.
Though I appreciate trying to make improvements, I don’t think another forum is needed. MSDN forums usually had/have pretty low-quality questions and answers compared to StackOverflow.
What’s wrong with all the existing avenues on StackOverflow or Github or Gitter or Discord? It’s hard enough to get you guys to seriously consider highly voted issues on dotnet/runtime (it took what, 6-7 years of open source .NET before any LINQ changes were even considered?). Speaking with decades of Microsoft experience here- the more forums for interaction you add the more likely your employees will just ignore all of them.
We want to meet developers where they are and encourage everyone to engage where they are hanging out regardless if that is SO, GitHub, Gitter, Discord, Q&A, Tech Community or more (checkout our community hub – https://dotnet.microsoft.com/platform/community).
What developers will find across Q&A and Tech Community spaces now is that you can easily join and engage with other developers across more products in a single place & feed including .NET, Azure, M365, Surface Duo, Office, and more.
StackOverflow/Github/Gitter/Discord have the advantage that they are supported by mobile apps (and 3 of them by desktop apps too). Microsoft forums are trying to run before they can walk. They have built achievements, following, followers, but the basic login experience is poor. My login status is never remembered and I have to manually log in each time I try to post on developercommunity.visualstudio.com or devblogs.microsoft.com .
I give positive feedback.
We needed a vibrant .NET community. Community is open! The old Microsoft Q&A forum is a place to answer technical questions, but the quality is questionable.
Rather, it would be a good answer to get feedback from passionate people who want to be active in an open community. And it is immediately shared with others! And a heated discussion will yield a rough but positive result.
I think we do need a place that can let us up vote or down vote for thing like bracking change make in .net before your team drop some features.
but for Q&A, I recommend using stackoverflow.com instead !!!!!!!!!!
Could someone please tell me who/where is the correct place to report issue of two OLD .NET updates showing up (only since November 2, PM Pacific time) in Windows (10) Update? Both of these were installed when then came out. I have had NO luck for the last 3 days convincing Windows Support people that the issue is NOT with my system (I have done bunch of testing for corruption etc with nothing found to be fixed), that it is something Micrsoft needs to fix. I am NOT the only one (my manager, and Google search has turned up forum posts in French, German and Portuguese) who has these 2 updates showing in Windows Update and they continually fail to download and install, error, 0x80070643. .NET Framework repair tool cannot fix (it sent logs in).
2021-09 .NET 5.0.10 Update x64 client KB5006192
2021-07 .NET 5.0.8 Update x64 client KB5004698
5.09 and 5.11 similar updates also successfully installed by Windows Update when they were released.
I am not a programmer. Visual Studio is required for me to use though in order to test content and features.
Thank-you.
Nice initiative. A place to discuss and share knowledge.
But require readable URLs to access the community hub landing page.
I think something like https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/dotnet is much better than https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/net/ct-p/dotnet and similarly for others.
Agreed, there should be easier URL.
Also, there should be a link to it on https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/
Yet another forum for MS products which will just add to confusion (https://forums.asp.net/, https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/, https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home?category=netdevelopment, … there are probably some more).
My prediction is:
– Questions there will probably only get answered by MVPs which have a standard response of something like ‘use DISM tool and if that does not help then reinstall everything’.
– Github will remain the only relevant place where you can view reasons for technical decisions for .NET and report issues
– StackOverflow will remain the place where people can really get the answers.