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.

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.