Ideal BB.NET uses Xheo Software’s Licensing 3.x product to secure the DLL’s and allow us to limit the feature set on each copy of the software. This has worked out fairly well for us but it does have some annoying issues which cause our customers to complain. For example, when you purchase our software, you have to wait for us to build and send you new license files. These files must be placed in the /bin folder for both Ideal BB and Ideal Admin. Thats a lot of work for one piece of software.

Now Xheo has a new product called DeployLX which would allow us to change the way we license our products. Instead of using a separate license file for each customer, we can now deploy with a serial number. So when you purchase one of our products you’ll get a serial number which will unlock it and allow you to get the full feature set. When you need more features (like more boards) we’ll send you a new serial number.

This serial number can be stored in the web.config, registry or a file on your HD. For now we’ll probably just use the web.config since it allow portability between a dev box and a production box.

We are experiencing several problems with this system as it caused quite a hit on our performance. Xheo’s technical support says that their products shouldn’t cause that kind of a hit, but I’m not so sure. We’re trying to work with them to get these issues resolved, but they’ve been less than helpful. Hopefully we’ll be able to resolve it soon so we can get 3.1.7 out the door. I’ll keep you updated.

One customer reported that they were having some issues with the subscription feature on Ideal BB.NET version 3.1.6.  Specifically they said that if they had multiple people subscribed to a single topic and a new reply was added to that topic, multiple emails would be sent out to those subscribed users.

Are any of you experiencing this issue?

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about subscriptions lately and I think there needs to be a daily digest option where all emails can be sent out in a digest format.  A feature like this would require a SQL job or some kind of Windows service to periodically send out those kinds of emails.  Is this a feature that you folks would be interested in? 

[UPDATE]
We did in fact have a bug in subscriptions which I just fixed for the next release.  If you are having this problem and need a quick fix, send me an email and I’ll shoot you over the fix.