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.

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.

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.

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.