I have written an asp.net control to do this for a site I administer.
View Control
I simply post news topics to a forum called "Site News" and the control
grabs the posts from the database, formats them and puts them on the
front page of the site. The control also counts the number of
comments and posts a link to the thread for people to add comments -
use the forum controls to control who can post new topics or who can
reply only.
The asp.net site and the asp forum are not related sites but they use
the same SQL Server database so I just tell the control to "Get forum
messages where forum = 2" (or whatever the forum code for the Site News
forum is).
There are a couple of basic modifications to the tblThread table and
post_message.asp to make this function properly but it is great when it
works and I can propogate the control to any site easily, just by
adding the control to a page and creating a new Forum for it.
I realise that an asp.net control is not what you're looking for but
really all i am doing is taking data from the tblTopic, tblThread
tables and formatting them the way I want on a page.
If you or anyone else is interested, I can post the code for the control so you can have a look.