Heh! Yeah. :)

The old P2P website used to run on the Windows version of MySQL, running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. I was terrifically fast and very reliable. The site also ran a Lyris listserver driven by PostgreSQL on Debian behind this. The site was essentially, a Windows 2000, ASP and IIS5.0 driven website, however, using feeds from both databases (the MySQL one being used for simple page content and site structure, and the PostgreSQL one holding the archive of messages). Dave Long of Wrox built an archiving system that pulled these archived mails out into a more readily available form: this is what you still see today, if you hit the "archives" link, on the left of the page. The system as a whole was very reliable (handling over 50,000 individual subscribers, and also serving to send the Wrox Developers Journal, once a fortnight - that latter was a 140,000-job send, on its own).

So, since the brief was to build a system that cost as little as possible (in real terms, the saving was probably about five to six thousand dollars), was as reliable and scalable as possible, while fitting into Wrox's "all Microsoft" approach to web serving, I think it was a pretty cool example of what you can get done with what's available elsewhere and still be a Microsoft developer.

Dan