Nick Malik said:
Personally, I oppose that.
a) Most of the "buttons on forms in comboboxes" questions are perfectly
valid questions on use of the .NET Framework.
Indeed they are... but they're not necessarily questions about a
specific language.
b) You cannot divorce C# from the .NET Framework (there wouldn't be a lot
left, would there?
Yes you can. You can divorce (to a very large extent) the language from
the libraries - and indeed, that has been done in the language
specification, which mentions very few actual types. It would be far
from impossible to have a newsgroup which solely dealt with questions
about the language itself. The trouble, however, would be keeping out
off-topic posts.
As for whether or not there's a lot left - I think there's a signficant
amount left. For instance, topics raised recently:
o Constness
o Passing parameters by value or reference
o Derived interfaces increasing the "breadth" of a property (i.e. just
a getter becoming getter and setter)
o What the compiler does with floating point constants (i.e. where
exactly does float f = (float) 34.5d; get converted from double to
single?)
o Upcoming Java language features vs C# features (current and upcoming)
There are some questions which *might* be appropriate to cross-post
between a language group and a framework group, and others (such as
singleton threadsafety) which might be appropriate to cross-post
between a language group and the CLR group.
A language-only group may well get relatively low (on-topic) traffic,
but I don't see that in itself as a major problem.
c) Yes, traffic is high... I barely have the bandwidth for a quick graze
over the list of questions and answers. That means finding something that
interests you should be fairly easy, and the information flow is high. I
also monitor the Biztalk newsgroup (not the beta). Now, that's a LOW volume
newsgroup. I learn a lot more from this one.
Sure, and I love a high-traffic group too - but I respect the fact that
not everyone does.
d) If someone has a question, they should have one forum to post it in that
encompasses the subject area (within reason). If I think my problem is C#,
it is usually a framework problem, and I have to solve it with a framework
'fix', then how would I know which forum to post to?
Ideally (IMO) there should be a newsgroup for framework questions posed
in C#, and a separate group for framework questions posed in VB.NET,
and then a separate group for the C# *language*, and another for the
VB.NET language. It wouldn't be hard to work out what went where.
e) I see very very very few questions on this forum that are specific to the
visual studio environment. Nearly all of the problems are C# or .NET
Framework problems. So, if you create a new forum, or a subforum, you will
get all of the questions from this one moving over there.
There's already a newsgroup for it - in fact a whole *set* of groups.
Search for groups containing the word "vsnet". Unfortunately people
don't tend to choose which group to post in very carefully.
f) it is HARD to get a community going that is this active. Moving forums
may be all that is required to fracture it, causing good posters and solvers
to go to one or another of the commercially-sponsored forums. That would
make the new forum far less valuable.
I don't believe that. I believe that the only problem with the idea is
that people always *do* post in inappropriate newsgroups, and that's
unlikely to change unless the groups become moderated (which I
certainly don't advocate).
