Here is a teaser image from the rating system:

Development has been going really well on this feature.  I was able to utilize a lot of the Asp.Net AJAX toolkit to make this feature work.  I’ve got it doing the actual ratings, but I haven’t written the code yet to filter based on ratings.  That is going to be the hardest part of writing this particular feature.  At the speed that development is currently going, I could see this feature being done by early next week.  I have a few other features that I want to write before doing the 3.1.8 release, but expect the release to go out the door in the next month.

Now that Ideal BB.NET 3.1.7 is out, I thought it would be a good time to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008.  I haven’t had a chance yet to go through the new .NET framework 3.5 to see what benifits (if any) that it would have on Ideal BB.NET, but Visual Studio 2008 lets you target .NET 2.0 apps so I figured upgrading wouldn’t hurt me.  I was correct.  The upgrade went smoothly and everything seems to work fine. 

I’m still wanting to go through the code and upgrade a lot of the code to .NET 2.0 features, like using Generics instead of ArrayLists, etc..  But that stuff is going to have to wait until I finish some of those new features we’ve got planned.

As far as Visual Studio goes, the new develpment environment has a couple of interesting features including some nice SQL tools for doing schema comparisons and generating change scripts.  It could be useful.

I’ve been searching for a really easy way to automate putting together builds of Ideal BB.NET.  Putting together a build usually takes about a day to do and has a lot of small steps.  For example:

1. Do a clean release build in visual studio
2. Copy the files to a new directory
3. Clean out the web.config files
4. Remove read-only on the files
5. Remove custom avatars and uploaded files
6. Run codeveil on the DLL’s to obfuscate them
7. Create directories for each of the builds CORP, LITE, etc..
8. Run SQL DIFF on the new database and create upgrade scripts
9. Zip up each release folder
10. Copy the files up to the web server.

Using Visual Build Professional, I’ve automated almost all of this so that I can press a button, relax with a cup of coffee and watch everything automatically put together.   Its really easy to use and works very well.  Visual Build Professional.

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.

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.