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.

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.