I hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.  I certainly did.  Now that the holidays are over (at least until Christmas) its time to get back down to business.

The next version of Ideal BB.NET is coming along nicely.   I’ve got almost all of the kinks from the .NET 1.1 to 2.0 upgrade out.  I’ve also managed to squash a lot of bugs since the last release.  Developing in Visual Studio 2005 is proving to be more efficient than the older version of VS.

I’m hoping to put together a beta version next week which I’ll release to the public and then a final shortly there after.  If you want to participate in the beta, please email me (you can get my contact info from the about page.)

Update:
I justed finished the last bug fix before the first beta.  We are going to do some internal testing to make sure that we didn’t break anything else and then we’ll release it next week as a beta.  This new version is labeled 3.1.6.xxx with xxx being the build number.  We are now syncing up the build numbers with the actual release numbers.  (The last released build was 2.1.5.xxx so being that we moved to .NET 2.0 we incremented to 3.)

One of the more important features that I’m working on for a future version of Ideal BB.NET is digg like ratings.  If you haven’t seen the digg web site (www.digg.com) you should check it out. 

There would be several phases to this feature.  The first phase would let you “digg” a post if you like it by pressing a button next to the post.  We would store the number of diggs that a post gets as well as the quality of the person that supplies the digg.  The client code would use AJAX so that users can digg multiple posts on a page without having to refresh the entire page.   Users would be able to view the number of diggs a post received next to the post itself.

Phase two would then provide different windows into the posts based on the information pulled from diggs.  For example, one view could show a listing of posts based on which posts are digged the most.  This would allow users to view content that is more popular rather based on users who actually read it and dug it.   Another view could show posts based on ones that have no diggs so that administrators could remove those posts keeping content very relevant and popular.

Phase three would then bring the digg ratings into the search results.  You would be able to search based on diggs as well as filter the search results based on diggs. 

I suspect that this feature will be very popular and extremely useful.  The key to keeping a good forum is making sure content stays on point and digg ratings would allow posts to be rated by users which would allow the better content to filter to the top.  I’ve already started writing the specs on this feature but I don’t have a time frame on when it would be done.  I need to get to some bug fixes first.   Hopefully by January we can have this feature in a shipping version of our product.

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.