GotDotNet.ru domain is 10 years old

Exactly 10 years ago, on October 19, 2001, the domain GotDotNet.ru was registered - one of the oldest sites for .NET developers in RuNet. By computer standards, 10 years is a whole era during which an unfamiliar new technology has become a familiar tool for many programmers. During this time, probably, every beginner .NET developer from RuNet has come into contact with this site, read an article, or asked a question in the forum. Thanks to this resource, a community of .NET developers has been formed in RuNet and a whole generation of specialists has grown professionally. The history of the development of GotDotNet.ru has many events, I would like to talk about some of them in this topic.

The history of this resource originates from the English site GotDotNet.com, which, unfortunately, has not been working for a long time. The GotDotNet brand was supposed to draw attention to the young .NET technology, which at that time was breaking the thorny path to success among many competitors. And in 2001, two DPE employees of the Russian representative office of Microsoft Dmitry Starostin and Kirill Zhuchkov began a project to create a Russian-language GotDotNet.


Dmitry Starostin and Kirill Zhuchkov 2001.

On October 19, 2001, a domain was registered, and at the Platform 2002 conference dedicated to .NET technologies on November 11, it was announced that GotDotNet.ru would soon appear on the Internet. The work on creating the site began to boil. Intel provided the server, and Garant-Park-Internet took over the hosting and development. On January 30, 2002, a press release was released, the site began to live its independent life, and many programmers got acquainted with this logo in RuNet.



Gradually, GotDotnet.ru became the main communication place for programmers on the .NET platform in RuNet; forums and articles contributed to this. By the way, it’s quite interesting to read those topics that were discussed on the forum. Sometimes they come across sometimes very funny answers. We assume that this is an Easter egg for the attentive (the very first topic in the screenshot).



Now about 55 thousand users are registered on the site. But then, in 2001, it was very difficult to understand how to draw the attention of an audience to a completely young technology and site. The most obvious decision was the contests, of which there have been many in the history of the site, but I would like to talk about some of them separately.

The very first competition was the .NET Terrarium "Game for Real Programmers." It started on March 4, 2002, a month after the launch of GotDotNet.ru, and at the same time was timed to coincide with the official presentation of Visual Studio .NET in Russia. The essence of the competition was that it was necessary to program the “animal” object, which was then launched in a special gaming environment on the hosting, and this animal, according to the implemented algorithms, had to survive, competing with the creations of other programmers. The types of these organisms were divided into predators and herbivores and also had a set of properties affecting speed, energy, camouflage ability, etc. Remotely, the idea was similar to CoreWars, but in a high-tech colorful design based on the .NET Framework 1.0. The creature of a certain kind in the game was a dynamically loadable library (hello CAS). Interestingly, the goal was not to "devour everyone" but to coexist successfully in the ecosystem of plants, predators and herbivores.



Here is how the algorithm of Asi, the animal winner, describes in words:

“If you see a predator, run away from it. If you see an animal of its kind, quickly running in one direction, run there too. If there are only strangers around, quickly and quickly eat all the grass so that others get less. If you do not see strangers, eat it exactly as much as necessary. Finally, if you see neither grass, nor predators, go where you look. "

On March 18, 2002, the results of the competition were announced, in which Sergey Povalyaev and Dmitry Kuzmenko won. As prizes, they were awarded P4 computers, powerful at that time.


Dmitry Starostin conducts a seminar on Terrarium, 2002.

The source code of one of the “animals” can be found at this address www.povalyaev.com/programming/terrarium_src_sam4_en.htm. By the way, the Terrarium project still exists and its source codes can be viewed on the site terrarium2.codeplex.com

Another quite sensational contest in the history of GDN was the Visual Basic.NET quiz. dedicated to the release of the Russian version. The essence of the contest was extremely simple. Answer 20 questions on May 14, 2004 from 22.00 to 24:00 and if you answer correctly to the maximum of questions get a prize. Everything would be fine, but the main prize was a Hyundai Getz car .


"Crazy night VB-programmer." The organizing committee and independent observers monitor the progress of the competition.

As stipulated by the terms of the competition, at 00:15 the development manager of development tools for the Moscow office of Microsoft Andrey Kryuchkov, in the presence of all members of the organizing committee and the supervisory board, called the winner and asked them to come to the office on Monday to draw up documents for the car ...


Dmitry Ilyin, winner of the 2004 competition years gets his car from the hands of Patrick Jelly, director
of the product localization group for Microsoft developers.

During the existence of the resource, many services were also implemented, for example, such as integration of forums with RSDN and ASPNetMania. One of the largest Russian banks, unable to provide Internet access at the workplace of programmers, worked with the GotDotNet.ru forum via mail. This was realized thanks to the additionally created SOAP transport.

As part of GotDotnet.ru, a pilot project was also conducted on the automatic translation of MSDN texts from English into Russian together with Promt. These developments were subsequently used on the MSDN website and which now allow you to see a machine translation of all articles.

Now in the design that many of us remember, GotDotNet.ru is not. On December 2, 2009, the engine and design were changed, many new features and services were added. Welcome to gotdotnet.ru, the central site for .NET developers. Join us and learn a lot of new things.



Thanks to everyone who has been with GotDotNet.ru all these years and especially www.gotdotnet.ru/people/veterans