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DreamInCode.net is all about developer forums. I had not heard of the site before being asked to write this review and assumed it had recently launched, but it’s over 6 years old and contains a huge amount of technical information.

The site has over 25,000 forum topics and nearly 190,000 replies. The focus is enterprise programming and web development, but they have sections for game development, harware & mods, operating systems, audio & video, networking and games. Hey, all coding and no games makes Billy Joe Coder a dull developer.

And, of course, you can subscribe to everything via RSS - a single forum, new code snippets, unanswered programming topics, etc…

What caught my attention immediately (in fact, the first thing I clicked on from the home page) are their programming reference sheets. Someone at DIC is thinking; offering these guides for free and placing a prominent DIC logo at the top makes them a fabulous viral marketing tool. My only disappointment is the lack of variety: they have VB6, C++, Java and ColdFusion reference sheets at the moment - hopefully they will create some more modern guides in the future.

Finally, the tutorials section is pretty cool. I receive a couple emails a month asking where someone should go to learn about programming and would like to refer people to a site like this (for non-.NET languages, since they don’t have any .NET tutorials).

My complaints? It’s kind of a nit, but the pages load times are bad (at least a few seconds each). The slow page loads make the site seem sluggish, and with as much content as they have it’s hard to navigate around as quickly as I would like. My other complaint is the lack of .NET-related content, but I imagine that www.asp.net has a bit of an advantage with .NET-related web programming forums.

About Me: My name is Rob Walling and I'm a software developer living and working in Boston (as of July 1, 2008). I write about hiring, managing, and motivating software developers, in addition to random outbursts on improving development skills and software startups.

My consulting firm, The Numa Group, performs .NET development for clients throughout the United States. If you are in need of a .NET developer or architect, drop me a line.

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