I’m actually quite surprised at how easy it was to upgrade Ideal BB.NET from ASP.NET 1.1 to 2.0.  It took me a few more hours today to complete the upgrade.  The biggest issue was a name space compatibility program between my IdealLogin library and the official .NET login library.  I tested out the web site briefly and most things seemed to work.  The AJAX stuff is partially broken but given that Microsoft provides a really great ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX library I’ll probably rewrite most of that stuff using those new routines.

I’ve got some customer reported bugs that I need to tackle tomorrow so I’ll focus on doing that and then get back to testing the 2.0 release.  I’m hoping to get it out the door soon so that customers can upgrade and take advantage of the new version.

When a new post is created on our Ideal BB.NET product, that post is parsed and all HTML is converted into IBB tags.  Those tags are then saved into the database.  When that post is requested to be displayed, those tags are converted into HTML and then displayed on the page.

We recently changed our rich text editor (RTE) to a more compatible product and in doing so, broke some of the formatting.  We’ll be releasing an update (version 1.6) that will correct most of these problems.

If you are experiencing any issues regarding the RTE and formatting, please post them to our Customer Portal so that we can address them in this next release. 

I’m in the process of migrating Ideal BB.NET from .NET 1.1 to 2.0.  I don’t see any reason to keep the product in 1.1 when I could fairly easily migrate it to 2.0 and take advantage of the new Visual Studio as well as the features of .NET 2.0.

I will continue to support version 1.1 for users that cannot upgrade to 2.0 but new development (features etc..) will happen on the 2.0 product only.  I can’t see why companies wouldn’t want the 2.0 product if given a choice between the two.  (Now is the time to speak out if you have any qualms about upgrading to 2.0.)

When I get everything upgraded, I’ll release it as Ideal BB.NET 2.0.  Feature-wise, everything will remain pretty much the same.  I’ve got some new features for the 1.6 release so that will probably be the last .NET 1.1 feature release until Ideal BB.NET 2.0 is out.

In an effort to reach out to our customers, we present the Ideal Science Blog conveniently located at www.idealscienceblog.com.   This blog will serve as an informal discussion about our products and services.  We’ll post entires that we believe are relevant to the work that we are doing and solicit feedback in the comments left on our blog.  Eventually we’ll move our discussion to our discussion forum.  (We aren’t quite there yet with integration.)

We wrote blog software a little while back that was very basic and allowed us to do a quick integration for a customer.  That software was so basic compared to the products on the market that we abandoned it to focus on the forums instead.  The Ideal Science blog is powered by WordPress and modified to fit the look and feel of our web site.  This might come as a surprise to many of you considering that WordPress isn’t even a .NET product.  We chose WordPress because as far as blog products go, this one is way superior.  (At least in our opinion.)

Going forward, we’ll build official support for WordPress blogs so that our product can easily integrate into a WordPress blog.  I imagine that support will come as a WordPress plug in.

Enjoy the new blog and good luck.