Ideal Science Blog

Using Google Code now for Issue Tracking

Josh Kerr — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:55:54 +0000

I’ve moved our issue tracking system from FogBugz to Google Code. You can see the issue tracker here:

http://code.google.com/p/idealbbnet/issues/list

I really like Google Code’s issue tracker and it is of course free to use. I’m probably going to move the Wiki over as well and then maybe some day in the near future the code too. I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about open sourcing Ideal BB.NET so if and when I bite the bullet and do it, it will go into this project.

Best way to secure ASP.NET applications?

Josh Kerr — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 17:45:22 +0000

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.

Vista development box woes.

Josh Kerr — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:33:27 +0000

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.

We’re still here and plugging away.

Josh Kerr — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:15:37 +0000

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.

Ratings System.

Josh Kerr — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 22:13:46 +0000

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.

Ideal BB.Net New Feature Survey Results

Maggie — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 21:17:40 +0000

I want to thank all of our Ideal BB.Net customers for taking the time to fill out the 10 question New Feature Survey. Congratulations to Robert from Sacramento for winning the 8GB ipod Nano! (You can see me drawing names out of a bowl below!)

We have taken everyone’s answers into consideration and have determined by popular vote to create a rating system as the next new feature. This rating system will allow an Ideal BB.Net user to vote on a scale of 1-5 stars for every post they read. A user will also be able to filter topics by stars, enabling only the specified star rated posts are visible. Eventually, this rating system will be incorporated into the search function.

Visual Studio 2008

Josh Kerr — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:10:21 +0000

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.

Visual Build Professional.

Josh Kerr — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:03:04 +0000

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:

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

Ideal Science forums upgraded.

Josh Kerr — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 18:52:54 +0000

We upgraded the Ideal Science forums today to run the latest version (3.1.7) of Ideal BB.NET. Everything should be working smoothly, but if you run into any problems, please contact us so that we can resolve it.

Ideal BB.NET 3.1.7 is out!

Josh Kerr — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 22:40:12 +0000

First, I released Ideal BB.NET 3.1.7 today. This new version fixes a lot of bugs, optimizes a lot of the code for better performance, and adds a few minor features. Mainly, this release will provide us with a better platform to add some major new features which we plan for the 3.1.8 release.

We also released a new version of the Ideal Science web site. The updated web site will help us distribute serial numbers which are now required for all Ideal BB.NET products. Rather than using the license files to unlock features, we are going to give you a serial number which you add to the web.config file.

We’ve also added a new Wiki for product documentation. (http://wiki.idealscience.com.) Going forward we will be placing all documentation there. This will help us keep our docs more up to date and allow the community at large to edit them.

We sent out a poll recently and based on some of the early results, it looks like the next big feature is going to be a buddy list. If you haven’t sent in your results yet, now is the time to do it as we are going to close the polls soon and issue a winner for the iPod. With the popularity of Facebook and Myspace I can see why folks would want a buddy list.

We will be upgrading our forums tomorrow to run the latest version of Ideal BB.NET so that you can try it out before you download and install it.