We are very pleased to announce the official release of InstantForum.NET v4.1.4 Final. Our main focus with this release was to resolve a number of know issues and further improve overall performance and scalability.

Although we have provided the change list below within our release candidate announcement we have resolved a few other key issues since then which have also been added to this list...

Performance & Scalability

• Resolved issue with tracking read forums and topics if you had read lots of forums or topics this was limited by the SQL datatype nVarChar.
  
• Completely revised the internals of how the InstantASP.InstantForum.Components.User / InstantASP.Common.Components.User objects are constructed for better performance and scalability.
  
• You can now associate an unlimited number of member groups to a single user (previously we had a limit again based on the length of the SQL datatype nVarChar) this would generate exceptions if the delimited list of role identities exceeded 4000 characters. This has been completely reworked.
  
• Resolved issue with events where they would not display if user has lots of role associations.
  
• Error handling has been added to all data access code to improve scalability and ensure objects (SQLConnections/FileStreams etc) are always disposed of correctly in the event of any exception.
  
• Greatly reduced overall string concatenation throughout. Reduced number of System.String() objects.
  
• Reduced by half the number of in-memory objects required by the application (InstantASP.Common.Components.*, InstantASP.InstantForum.Components.*, etc)
  
• Reduced the number of items held within the ASP.NET cache to minimize memory usage.
  
• Improved overall performance for several key regular expression methods.
  
• Improved general performance for key areas such as localization, search, synchronization and particularly how the forum / sub forum collection is constructed. This now provides much better performance for larger forums (100+ forums).
  
• Application setting datatables are no longer cached as they are held within singleton objects and only initialized once.
  
• Reworked page compression feature for better performance.
  
• Performed work to ensure objects are promoted up the heap for quicker garbage collection.
  
• General code refactoring and review.

New Features (Unfortunately not many)

• We have now added a central moderation screen which will allow moderators to quickly see all posts awaiting approval in all forums they have been assigned to moderate. The moderation queue is searchable by keyword, username, member group & more.

General Updates

• Updated the paging links to use the full absolute URL to pages as opposed to a doPostBack for each link. This ensures search engine spiders can now go from page to page within the application correctly.
  
• Updated the application to now support medium trust ASP.NET environments. Previously exceptions would be raised due to security restrictions in medium trust hosting environments. This rendered the application virtually unusable in medium trust, this has been resolved.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed issue with forum group links.
  
• Fixed problem with member list where you could see hidden roles if you knew the identity.
  
• Fixed security issue with attachments in private forums.
  
• Fixed issue inline editing of subject where a problem would occur if the title tag was the same as the link text.
  
• Fixed wrong text when deleting skins, also resolved an issue with skin cache not clearing correctly.
  
• Resolved issue with GenericPrincipal not casting to RolePrincipal when integrated with .NET v2.0 login controls and membership API.
  
• Fixed issue where anonymous users would not be tracked if forum activity panel was disabled for anonymous permission set.
  
• Fixed client-side JavaScript issue with spell checker not working under .NET v2.0.
  
• Fixed client-side JavaScript issue with IFCode panelbar on post.aspx when running under .NET v2.0.
  
• Addressed issue with storing lots of user roles within the forms authentication ticket.
  
• Fixed issue where RSS feed date stamp was not localized with current time zone offset and dst settings.
  
• Fixed issue with spell checker not working when forum was hosted in a sub-directory of a web application.
  
• Fixed issue with IFCode WYSIWYG buttons (Bold, Insert Images) not working in FireFox & Opera.
  
• Fixed issue with Manage Member Groups page where it would generate an exception if a member group did not have a permission set associated.
  
• Fixed issue with the ReturnURL after a login when a certain sequence of links are clicked.
  
• Fixed IFCode [QUOTE] tag issue in Mozilla based browsers.
  
• Fixed issue with "Override default date & time format?" option not saving within General Settings.
  
• Fixed issues with menu's not closing correctly when hosted in a parent div layer.
  
• Fixed two small grammatical errors in en-US\Resources.xml.

More information about this release can also be found in our release candidate post at http://support.instantasp.co.uk/FindPost11350.aspx

We have now removed the Release Candidate from your My.InstantASP accounts to avoid any confusion on which download you should use. As a result you may have some empty orders appear on your My Orders page within your My.InstantASP account. We are working to resolve this. It won't affect access to the v4.1.4 Final.

Upgrade instructions can be found within our online documentation at http://docs.instantasp.com/InstantForum/default.html?page=v413tov414guide.html

We have also updated our downloadable documentation to include the latest v4.1.4 class reference. This can be found at http://www.instantasp.co.uk/Products/Documentation/Default.aspx

Existing InstantForum.NET v4.x customers can download the v4.1.4 release from their My.InstantASP account at http://my.instantasp.co.uk/MyLicenses.aspx

Please remember you may need your My.InstantASP username and password to access the latest downloads. If you've lost your My.InstantASP password you can request this from http://my.instantasp.co.uk/ForgotPassword.aspx

If you do have any problems during the upgrade process, please don't hesitate to contact technical support or post your questions within our community forums.

For those who assisted with the BETA and release candidate stages we sincerely appreciate all your support and feedback. Mark, Bare, Cristiano, James, Goonie & Carlos a special thanks for all your feedback. Thanks to all our customers for your patience throughout this release.

We sincerely hope you all enjoy the update,


Kindest Regards,

Ryan Healey
Director / Developer

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