I’m currently using Xheo’s DeployLX product to secure Ideal BB.NET so that you need to enter a serial number in order to use the product beyond the trial period.  I was curious as to what products you folks are using to secure your applications.   Please post the products you use in the comments.

My Vista development box died yesterday so I had to rebuild.  Vista was a mistake when I originally setup the box.  It is a dog, annoying and really not suited for Visual Studio .NET development.  I went back to Windows XP 64bit instead which runs so much better.

I have an old laptop that I installed the Windows 7 beta on a few days ago.  Windows 7 is actually running as fast (if not faster) than Windows XP.  I have my fingers crossed that Microsoft will release a solid product later this year.  Stability and speed are my most important factors in considering an operating system.  Vista was a bad choice on my part.

Its been over a year since I’ve updated the blog, so I thought I’d drop a note to let you folks know that we are still working.  The last year was filled with a lot of custom development that didn’t make it into our shipping product.  That work is now coming to an end so its time to begin adding features and fixes to our existing product.

We’ve got a few bids for custom work still in the pipeline but that work will most likely end up in our shipping product.

I’ll have some more information in the next few weeks.

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.