Domain GotDotNet.ru 10 years

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 epoch during which an unfamiliar new technology has become a familiar tool for many programmers. During this time, probably every novice .NET developer from Runet came into contact with this site, read the article, or asked a question in the forum. Thanks to this resource, the .NET community of developers in Runet has been formed and a whole generation of specialists has grown professionally. The history of GotDotNet.ru has a lot of events, some of them I want to tell in this topic.

The history of this resource originates from the English-language site GotDotNet.com, which, unfortunately, has long ceased to work. The GotDotNet brand was supposed to draw attention to the young .NET technology, which at that time was breaking through its thorny path to success among many competitors. And in 2001, two employees of DPE at the Russian representative office of Microsoft, Dmitry Starostin and Kirill Zhuchkov, started a project to create a Russian-speaking GotDotNet.


Dmitry Starostin and Kirill Zhuchkov 2001.

The domain was registered on October 19, 2001, and at the Platform 2002 conference devoted to .NET technologies on November 11, an announcement was made that GotDotNet.ru would soon appear in runet. Boil work to create a site. Intel provided the server, and Garant-Park-Internet took over hosting and development. On January 30, 2002, a press release was issued, the site began to live its own independent life, and many programmers met this logo in runet.
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Gradually, GotDotnet.ru became the main place of communication for programmers on the .NET platform in runet, this was facilitated by forums and articles. By the way, it is interesting enough to read those topics that were covered in the forum. Sometimes they come across sometimes very funny answers. We assume that this is an Easter egg for attentive (the very first topic in the screenshot).



Now on the site are about 55 thousand users. But then, in 2001, it was very difficult to understand how to attract the attention of the audience to a completely young technology and site. The most obvious solution was the competition, which in the history of the site was a lot, but I would like to tell 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 dedicated to the official presentation of Visual Studio .NET in Russia. The essence of the competition was that it was necessary to program the object “animal” 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, ability to camouflage, etc. Remotely, the idea was similar to CoreWars but in a high-tech colorful version based on the .NET Framework 1.0. A creature of a certain kind in the game was a dynamically loaded library (hi CAS). Interestingly, the goal was not “to devour everyone” but successfully coexist in the ecosystem of plants, predators and herbivores.



This is how the Asi algorithm is described - an animal winner:

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

On March 18, 2002, the results of the competition, in which Sergey Povalyayev and Dmitry Kuzmenko won, were summed up. As prizes, they were presented with powerful at the time computers P4.


Dmitry Starostin conducts a seminar on Terrarium, 2002.

The source code of one of the “animals” can be found here at this address www.povalyaev.com/programming/terrarium_src_sam4_ru.htm . By the way, the Terrarium project still exists and its source codes can be viewed on the website terrarium2.codeplex.com

Another quite sensational competition in the history of GDN was the Visual Basic .NET quiz. dedicated to the release of the Russian version. The essence of the competition was extremely simple. Answer 20 questions on May 14, 2004 from 10 pm to midnight and in case of a correct answer to a maximum of questions, get a prize. All anything, but the main prize was a car Hyundai Getz .


"Crazy Night VB Programmer". The organizing committee and independent observers monitor the competition.

As it was stipulated by the terms of the competition, at 00:15, the manager for the development of the development tools of the Moscow office of Microsoft, Andrei Kryuchkov, in the presence of all the members of the organizing committee and the supervisory board, called the winner and asked him to drive to the office on Monday to get documents for the car


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

During the existence of the resource, a lot of services were also implemented, for example, such as the integration of forums with RSDN and ASPNetMania. One of the largest Russian banks, not being able to provide Internet access at workplaces 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 to Russian together with Promt. These developments were subsequently used on the MSDN website and which now allow you to see the machine translation of all articles.

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



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