I’m almost done with Ideal BB.NET 3.1.7.  There are a few outstanding bugs that I’ve fixed, but I’m still needing some more time for testing.  This new build is more of a bug fix build rather than a feature build.  It removes a lot of the legacy 1.1 stuff and adds more efficient ASP.NET 2.0 code.

I do have a lot of neat features planned for the 3.1.8 build.  Among them is a rating system for rating posts and users which will also incorporate a mechanism to search based on those ratings.

Lastly is a better profile system for users that includes buddy lists and some nice AJAX mouse hovers to view profiles of members without needing to open a new page.

I’m hoping to have 3.1.7 wrapped up in the next two weeks.

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.

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.

We’ve got some of our early adopter customers doing some testing on Beta 2.  We should get the last of the bugs squashed and then get it out the door in the next week or so.

When version 3.1.6 is completed, we will deploy it to the Ideal Science web site so that you can see and use the new features.  We’ve already done a few .NET 1.1 to 2.0 upgrades and it is fairly easy.  We’ll have complete documentation on the process to make your upgrades go smoothly.