StackOverflow.com. The best developer resource since MSDN. Stack Overflow is the brain child Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood and is collaboratively built and maintained by the users of the site. I am proud to be a member of Stack Overflow and have been using it over 10 months now. I unfortunately heard about it too late to get involved in the beta, but I'm on the site daily both asking questions and trying to answer other people's questions.

So what are the positive points that make Stack Overflow such a useful tool for developers?

• It's 100% free!
• You don't need to sign up to post on the site
• You can post a question in seconds and often receive an answer within 5-10 minutes
• It uses OpenID so there's no need to remember yet another username and password combination
• And most importantly, it's fun!

Stack Overflow, unlike other Q&Aesque sites (I'm looking at you experts-exchange), is completely free with zero or little adverts (once you sign up and gain over 200 Reputation points). To be honest, I'd be happy to pay for the service that Stack Overflow provides, but that's not the mentality behind Joel and Jeff. They wanted to create a community of developers that can assist each other and grow together, and that's exactly what they've achieved. The site has saved my neck on numerous occasions, enabled me to keep deadlines and produce quality code.

But what makes Stack Overflow fun? Reputation! Reputation is the main driving force behind the community. As you can see to the right of my blog, I've currently got about 1800 reputation. This is nothing compared to the likes of Jon Skeet and Marc Gravell. While I'm on the subject I'd highly recommend their blogs as well, and for anyone that does a lot of serialization, protobuf-net by Marc is one fantastic tool that I use almost daily. Anyway, away from brown nosing and back to reputation... Rep is earned by answering questions and by asking questions. Any answer or question can be voted up or down. Each up vote is worth 10 reputation and each accepted answer is worth 15 reputation. It's this drive to earn reputation that makes the site enticing. There's a great deal of satisfaction in knowing something someone else doesn't and being rewarded for helping them out.

And then there's the catch. Well, it's no some much of a catch as a disappointment. As with all communities there are those that don't follow the etiquette. The only thing that ruins Stack Overflow for me occasionally is users who fail to accept questions. There's nothing worse than sitting there with your answer upvoted 10 times by the community and to then never hear from the question asker ever again. These people continue posting other questions on the site, so it's not as though they've just left the community. Luckily there's a feature on Stack Overflow that shows peoples accept rates. You can then decide, based on their accept percentage, whether you should spend your time helping them out. It's a shame this has to happen and that there has to be a thought of 'should I bother helping this guy or girl out?'

But that's the only downer on the whole community in my experience, and if you haven't tried it, give it a go now.