We upgraded our own forums to Ideal BB.NET 3.1.6 RC1.  The new version of Ideal BB.NET is now running on the .NET 2.0 framework.  There are some new features including the ability to upload an avatar, and the active posts section which highlights the most active topics based on the number of replies they’ve received.

This build is a release candidate meaning that we are hoping to release this build as the final in a few weeks so feel free to browse through it and post a few sample topics.  If you find any issues, please report them to us by using the contact us page.  (www.idealscience.com/site/about/contact.aspx).

We will be upgrading our forums to the latest version of Ideal BB.NET tomorrow.  We’ve got everything running great on our staging platform, but the migration to the production server will probably be a headache.  There will be some forum downtime tomorrow as we do the migration. 

The new version of the board is the same build that is currently in RC and after about a week or so of running it on our own servers, we’ll probably release it as final.

[Update]

The forum update is complete.  It took about 2 minutes to copy the files over and sync the database.  There was about 10 seconds of down time which is very acceptable in my opinion.

We have several customers that are having a licensing issue when using Windows 2003 in a web farm senario and customers who might be testing our software on Windows Vista.  The issue is a security one that requires that you register the xheo.licensing.dll with the Windows GAL.  Once you do this, licensing should work fine.  This issue only affects Ideal BB.NET.

If you are experiencing this issue and continue to have problems, please contact us.

I am pleased to announce Ideal BB.Net Version 3.1.6 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download today, February 12, 2007, in the Ideal Science store at http://www.idealscience.com/site/store/catalog.aspx. 

Features and Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused the pagers to be hidden on most of the board.  This is a pretty bad bug as you can’t page through the results on the board.  The bug was introduced when doing the .Net 2.0 upgrade as some of the .Net events seems to have changed order.
• Added the Active Topics page which lists topics based on the number of replies they have.  This link is available from the top of the page and requires that you add the necessary code to your header .ascx skin if you aren’t using the default theme.
• Fixed some issues with the movepost stored procedure that caused stats to not properly update after a move.
• Fixed issue where member counts were not updated after deleting a post.
• Fixed bug where topic page URL was not correct in RSS feed.

I hope that you find this upgrade valuable as we have eagerly anticipated launching these improvements.  Upgrades are a feature of the yearly maintenance package which allows for continued support.  When the .Net software was originally purchased, a year of support and maintenance was included.  Each subsequent year, maintenance will be 20% of the original license purchase.  These support renewals can be made over the phone at 512-401-9811×200. 

I hope everyone had a wonderful new year and a good start to 2007. The weather seems to have returned to normal so I do not foresee any more office closings. There are great things coming up this year including a new Beta release sometime next week. Current customers will receive a notification email when the upgrade is available for download in the Ideal Science store. Please feel free to leave comments, especially if you want/need a feature that is not yet available in the Ideal BB.Net forums or if you have a question for the development team. We are always open to suggestions!