One of the common features on forum is called the moderated forum.  This type of forum allows users to create posts but those posts don’t appear until a moderator has a chance to read through them and then approve them.  Non approved posts are usually deleted.

While thinking about this type of functionality, I thought of a cool way to create very interesting work flows on the forums.  As new posts are created and then approved, they move through a series of different forums until they end up at their destination.  So for each forum you can set it to be moderated and then choose the destination forum for new content.   So if you create a new post in a moderated forum, it is moved to the forum you setup as the destination.  Then when the post is approved, it is moved to the next destination.

Lets say I have five forums: Bugs,  Bug Reports – Bug Confirmed – Bug Fixed – Bug Tested – Bug Killed.   When I create a new post in Bugs, it automatically moves to Bug Reports and awaits moderation.  A moderator reads it and then clicks the approve button.  This post now moves to Bug Confirmed.  Then another moderator does his thing and then click approve and the post moves to Bug Fixed.  When the process is done, the bug entry ends up at the Bug Killed forum.  What is nice about this process is that you can have some of the forums set to private so they are hidden from other users, you can control security on each forum so that only certain people can work with posts in certain forums. 

I think a feature like this would have a lot of good use scenarios and it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to implement.

I’ve been a developer for more than 15 years now and I’ve always used a Windows box to write software.  I started out at Compaq Computer Corp writing device drivers in C in the mid 90’s on Windows NT, then Win32/MFC apps in Windows 2000 and finally .NET applications in Windows XP.  Today, I’m writing .NET apps on a Mac.

Well, I’m not being totally honest, it is true that I’m using a MacPro running OSX to write software, but I’m still running Windows XP through Parallels, the virtualization software for OSX.  You might wonder why I’d prefer this setup to just running Windows XP natively, and I’ve got a few answers that will shed some light on the subject.

First, easy backups.  My parallels hard drive is a single file approximately 60gb in size.  When I’m ready to back it up, I just copy that one file to either tape, or in my case, a network backup drive which gets backed up to tape.  This makes backing up so simple.

Second, unlimited system restores without worrying about whether or not the software will correctly restore me.  If I’m about to install new software and I’m unsure about compatibility or if I just want to test something out, I can make a duplicate copy of my Parallels hard drive and then boot it up, try it out and if I don’t like it, just delete it.  No need to use system restore software to bring my machine back to some previous configuration.

Third, I can easily move the file between computers.  Lets say I want to bring my development environment on the road with me.  I can just copy the Parallels hard drive file to my laptop and boom, I’ve got everything i need.  When I’m done using it on the road, I copy it back to my MacPro and I’ve got everything exactly the way I left it after I was done using it on my trip.

There are a lot of other reasons why I prefer this configuration.  For example, there are Macintosh applications that in my opinion work better than their Windows counter parts.  Now I get the best of both worlds.  I also find OSX much more stable than Windows.  I get uptimes of several weeks rather than several days.  I also find that I need to reboot Windows pretty often (with security updates and the sort) so its nice to be productive while Windows is rebooting.  I can surf the web and do other Mac tasks while Windows is doing its thing.  Lastly, Parallels has an option called Coherence which lets you run your Windows programs right along side your Mac programs instead of using a Window.  This is pretty neat and makes me very productive.

I’ve been working in this way for about two months now and I’m very pleased.  My Windows apps run very quickly on a MacPro with two Dual Core 3.0Ghz processors and 4gb of Ram.  While this is an expensive setup, I’d recommend to most Windows developers.

I want to thank all of our customers and potential customers for their patience during the previous two weeks while we moved offices.  As promised, here are some pictures of the new space, enjoy!

We upgraded our own forums to Ideal BB.NET 3.1.6 RC1.  The new version of Ideal BB.NET is now running on the .NET 2.0 framework.  There are some new features including the ability to upload an avatar, and the active posts section which highlights the most active topics based on the number of replies they’ve received.

This build is a release candidate meaning that we are hoping to release this build as the final in a few weeks so feel free to browse through it and post a few sample topics.  If you find any issues, please report them to us by using the contact us page.  (www.idealscience.com/site/about/contact.aspx).

We moved into our new offices last week and we got most of our boxes unpacked.  The move went fairly smooth thanks to Maggie’s planning.  Customers saw very little downtime while we moved them to the new production servers in NYC and we got back to business within 24 hours of completing the actual physical move.

The new office is in the heart of downtown Austin in a great area central to pretty much everything.  When we put the final touches on the space we’ll post some pictures.