Apparently there was an issue with the license files which would cause the demo version to appear expired.  I just uploaded a new version that corrects this problem.  Also, some files were missing in the Ideal Admin folder which have also been uploaded. 

Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause you.  If you’ve already installed the software, just replace the idealadmin folder with the one included in the new zip file and drop the *.lic files from the /ibb/bin folder in the zip file into the one on your board. 

It took a while, but Ideal BB.NET 3.1.6 is now available for download in both demo form and from the customer section of our web site in its full blown ready for product form.

This new version includes support for .NET 2.0 so make sure that your web platform supports the new framework before trying to install it.   There are some new features from the previous version, but the biggest change is that it now uses the 2.0 framework.  We haven’t had a chance to take advantage of many of the new framework features, but we do plan to in the future. 

This new release ditches the installer that we had shipped in previous versions.  The installer was bulky, hard to debug and didn’t support upgrades and merges.  After several days of deliberations we just decided it wasn’t worth supporting anymore.  So you’ll have to do a manual install which is fairly easy and similar to most other .NET web applications so it shouldn’t be too much trouble.

The next release will include both bug fixes and new feature upgrades.  We’ve already started on it and plan to have it ready to go at the end of June.  Of course if we find any serious bugs in the 3.1.6 release we will provide bug fixes for it and possibly minor releases in between 3.1.6 and 3.1.7.

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.

We will be upgrading our forums to the latest version of Ideal BB.NET tomorrow.  We’ve got everything running great on our staging platform, but the migration to the production server will probably be a headache.  There will be some forum downtime tomorrow as we do the migration. 

The new version of the board is the same build that is currently in RC and after about a week or so of running it on our own servers, we’ll probably release it as final.

[Update]

The forum update is complete.  It took about 2 minutes to copy the files over and sync the database.  There was about 10 seconds of down time which is very acceptable in my opinion.