I happened to check out the www.DefyAllChallenges.com website today, which is a Microsoft site aimed at developers. (Though I think aimed at those who are a lot more interested in gaming than I am. The only game I ever played besides Solitaire was MYST (for Win 3.1) and this site totally reminds me of that.)

The first thing I watched was a short interview wtih Scott Guthrie. If you don't already know how passionate Scott is about the work he does, hearing him say that he gets and answers about 150 customer emails a day might make an impression on you. You need to understand that Scott is the General Manager of Client and Web Platform & Tools and has a few other major responsibilites to deal with!

When he says things like: "the biggest joy of my job is that I can hopefully touch millions of people's lives in a positive way and make development better for everyone." And it's "why I come to work", he means it. This is not a marketing message! Scott is truly like "the boy next door" in his genuineness. (Yep, it's a word. I checked.)

But the real reason behind this post is because Scott listed three things developers don't know about ASP.NET and because I only happened to know two of the three, I thought I would share the list.

1) MySpace runs on ASP.NET. MySpace gets more page views than any other site - over 4 BILLION a day.(That is a considerable increase from one year ago when it was "only" 1.5 billion a day.) All ASP.NET pages. Very cool. (This is the one I didn't know). Also, here is an interesting article about how MySpace's unexpected growth threw them for a loop and their switched to ASP.NET.

2) You can develop ASP.NET sites (and with AJAX) for free. Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is free and the .NET Framework is free and the AJAX extension are free. And if you want to do data access, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is free. Start here for the downloads.

3) There are over 40 free video tutorials on the www.asp.net website to help developers learn ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX programming.Here...