Channel 9 Video Request

vaibhavkamath wrote:

It would be fun to learn how Channel 9 itself was designed / architected. What were the hurdles the team had to face, what are the recurring problems the team has to go through. How the site is managed / maintained. What design decisions that were made initially that the team isn't very happy about and vice versa.

Thanks,
Vaibhav

You're assuming the Channel 9 team might want to air their dirty laundry in public!

I get the impression that Channel 9's core code base wasn't designed - it sort of "grew" out of code that started off as IBuySpy portal and, as a result, is spaghetti-like and hard to maintain (but, admittedly, I may be misinterpreting conversations I overheard at PDC!). Given the number of times I get a .NET error screen or performance has suddenly screamed to a halt I don't think an interview would necessarily reveal best practices for architecture, although I'm sure if they were allowed to be honest, there would be some important lessons to be learnt on design and mistakes that need to be avoided.

It's interesting that of the handful of "showcase sites" listed on the new Community Server 2.0 site Channel 9 is one of them! I think it's a thin line in marketing between "uses some of the code from Community Server and a LOT of hand-crafted code and mods" and "uses Communuty Server out of the box". Admittedly Rob Howard had a hand in the code of both Channel 9 and Community Server 2.0 but I think that to say Channel 9 is "built on Community Server 2.0" is stretching it a fair bit.

Hopefully someone from Channel9 will be along soon to confirm/deny what I'm saying.

(For the record I'm using Community Server myself and love the 2.0 version, but admittedly I haven't really delved into the code and a lot of that "love" comes from its cheap price - looking forward to purchasing a license in a few weeks and testing out the "blog by email" feature).