Question

It’s my understanding that StackOverflow (SO) was built using ASP.NET. What surprised me is it’s so well designed and well implemented. Without knowing much about the internals of SO, here are my observations and educated guesses:

1. SO appears to be highly scalable.
2. URLs in SO are friendly.
3. It appears that SO does not contain a bunch of controls as most ASP.NET apps I’ve seen.
4. Judiciously and effectively use of Ajax requests, opacity animation, etc. Viewing source tells me SO is using jQuery.
5. SO runs on all major browsers (that I’ve used and this list includes IE, FF, Chrome, Opera).

Edit: 6. Comet-like feature: As you type your answer, if there is any other answer posted, you get the notification. If you choose to load it, of course only a partial page refresh is done and your answer remain intact. Have yet to see this in any other ASP.NET app.

So my questions:

• What are other ASP.NET web applications that are as well done as StackOverflow and what are their features that you like?
• Can you share about some more details about SO, for example is SO built using ASP.NET MVC or something else?

Answer 1

Orkut.com – A social networking site by google uses ASP.NET