Welcome to the Xtras.Net Community Site

For many years, Xtras.Net (and our original website VBxtras) had a strong tradition of taking the lead in creating new, high quality content about third party ActiveX and .Net Components and Tools. 

Starting with our printed catalogs which were filled with reviews written by actual developers, then moving to our websites, and our "What's New" email broadcast - they were focused on bringing you the latest information and detailed reviews on the products you were interested in most.

There were a lot of reasons why that has broken down in recent years, but one of them is that we built up an infrastructure for maintaining and creating this content that was very expensive - it took a lot of manpower and a lot of time working with clunky internal systems to add simple things.

I knew that when I took over as Xtras.Net's President, if we were going to be successful in helping developers find and buy the right tool for the job, we were going to have to fix this.  This website is the first step in that process.  Rather than building the tools ourselves, we found that Community Server could serve as the base for a lot of what we needed to do. 

Our first step - We're going to start by launching our Xtras.Net's What's New Blog on this site.  We will focus on latest news about Microsoft related third party components and tools - both commercial and open source.  Then we will use the RSS feed from this blog to power a portion of our home page content and a weekly email broadcast.  Our next step is using /n software's IP*Works! RSS components - http://www.xtras.net/products/ipworks/ - to set up the connection between our blog and our home page. We'll keep you posted on how it works.

If you're interested in this content, it will be up to you how you receive it.

Please share any ideas, suggestions you might have - prez@xtras.net

- Bill Kaylor
President, Xtras.Net