One cool thing about blogs is that you can brainstorm ideas and send them to the entire world to see who likes them. Of course, in my case, the entire world is limited to the three of you reading this, but in theory there could be more. Something I haven’t done much of in the past is solicit feedback from the general public about ideas I have for AspAlliance.com’s direction or features. I usually discuss such things with the site’s team of editors, authors, etc. but this time I thought I’d try something new and just post to the world.

Idea #1 – Caching Resource Center. Some of you may have noticed that I have this thing for caching. I do a lot of my presentations on the subject and I try to use it a lot in my applications to make them wicked fast. It’s just cool. However, there is no one place you can go to learn all about it. There are no books dedicated to it that I know of (for ASP.NET), and if there were they probably wouldn’t be best-sellers. So what I’m thinking of here is adding a section to AspAlliance.comdedicated to caching resources. This would include links to all the caching articles I’ve ever written, as well as MSDN references, other caching articles, perhaps book sample chapters, a discussion forum, links to caching-dedicated mailing lists on AspAdvice, etc. Essentially, a one-stop place to go if you want to learn something about caching or have a problem you’re trying to solve related to caching. My thought is I would put this in a subfolder, /caching/.

Idea #2 – AspAlliance Framework. There are a lot of very smart people involved with AspAlliance.com. We each individually have a lot of really cool code libraries we’ve developed over the years which we use in our various applications. For myself, I have a library that I reference in just about all of my projects called AspAlliance.Framework. It includes helper methods for a wide range of common tasks. My thought here would be to offer a similar framework on AspAlliance.com as a free and open source library. It would include contributions from a variety of AspAlliance authors (and probably there would be a few articles written on it). It could probably include most of the same kinds of resources as the caching section would, and might live in its own subfolder as well, a la /framework/.

That’s enough for now. Please comment on how worthwhile you think these would be. Feel free to contact me directly if you’d like, too, using the contact link on this page.