The video shown above in many ways accurately describes how my team has felt over the past year. We signed up for a big mission, to go beyond just Channel 9 and deliver a network of online community focused on a wide variety of audiences.
It has been hard. Sometimes we wondered if we’d win the war. Today a small, but important victory. A new update to the Channel 9 Version 4.0 Beta.
You see, we put a lot of thought into the infrastructure we ran. We looked at the size of our team, asked questions how we’d support our code base without becoming a mammoth sized team and ultimately made a very difficult decision to re-build our code-base from the ground up. Hopefully resulting in something that we’d run our business for many, many years ahead.
This received the name “Channel 9 Version 4.0″.
The original Channel 9 was written on a fork of the original ASP.NET Forums, a predecessor to the wonderful Community Server Product. In our wildest dreams we never imagined that Channel 9 would receive the amount of traffic it currently gets and the code-base was showing signs of wear.
So enter Channel 9 Version 4.0. It is written in such a way that it can be easily modified and maintained for all the communities we run. Our team will be able to iterate faster and ship often. All the features are written with the entire network in mind and we keep things very, very light weight.
It has been a long, hard road as we learnt this past year to operate as a much larger team. We had to learn what was the right amount of process, how best to document our requirements and how to factor in the feedback from our communities. A lot has happened since 5 guys from Redmond launched the original Channel 9.
Most of it good too. 
So today we released a second major update to the beta. Over on Channel 9, Duncan amplifies with even more details about this important update. The update is by no means feature complete, but our team is on a steady cadence to deploy V4 on all of the communities we run. We will move it over to the main C9 site once we have it stable, feature complete and of course our community “Believes” in C9 V4.0
I think we could write a book about the last year. Definitely lots of do’s and don’ts in software development. More on that later, but for now I believe in Channel 9, do you?
