First i'd like to apologize for not being very active here recently. I've been very busy over the last few weeks working towards getting the new site online, moving to our own servers and ensuring progress with InstantKB.NET 2.0. I trust James has been helping with any questions but i always feel guilty if i'm not active here.

New Site, New Servers

I'm delighted to announce we are finally live with our new site and servers. The previous site was looking a little old and lacked the standards compliance and accessibility support we are now working towards in our products. Our goal was to make the new site much more user friendly, hopefully more structed & dare i say it "web 2.0". The previous site was  both a little link and table heavy.

It became clear to us after several hours of downtime a couple of months back we needed 24/7 direct access to our own servers. With the move to our own hardware we now have three brand new dell poweredge servers powering InstantASP.co.uk. We have now moved all our systems to .NET 2.0, Windows Server 2003 (IIS6) & SQL Server 2005. Previously we ran .NET 1.1 on a mix of OS with SQL Server 2000. Hopefully these improvements will ensure the best possible experience whilst browsing the forums, knowledge base, My.InstantASP and other areas of our site.

So far the feedback has been positive and thanks to all that have sent comments through me via live chat and email. We are still working through issues (mainly around CSS) with the XHTML move but would certainly appreciate any comments good or bad.

Sorry if the trasnfer did cause any problems. A few areas of our site including these forum have been offline for a few days. With the move now complete you'll hopefully notice things are much quicker. We do plan to continue to improve the site and I've listed a brief list of the things you'll see added over the coming weeks / months...

• - Developer / Resource Center
  At it's launch this will simply act as a resource for downloading and sharing skins, language packs, code snippets & modifications for our products.We are working to offer an extensibility model built directly into our products which will allow the development & integration of additional 3rd party modules / plugins. Our goal is to create an area of our site to allow developers using our software to freely download. discuss & rate ideas, modifications, add-ons & code to further extend and customize our software. We'll also be working to contribute to this area with our own code and feedback.
• - Blogs
  This has been requested several times recently. We'll be going live with our own blog soon to keep everyone more updated on product development and general day to day activities. We are hoping to use our own simple blogging tool for this.

- Enhanced My.InstantASP
Improvements to My.InstantASP will include a feature request / osculation system so we know exactly what you want to see in the next release or future updates. We also have a number of other ideas to improve our customer area you'll see in 2008.

- Single Sign-On
We'll be working to ensure you only have to login once to access your forum, knowledgebase or My.InstantASP. account.

We do of course have further ideas but i don't want to reveal to much at this stage

InstantKB.NET 2.0

- Why did we update the site when there is urgency for InstantKB.NET 2.0?

I was keen to hold off on our server transfer and site update until InstantKB.NET 2.0 final was available. However our previous servers didn't actually run .NET v2.0 (required for kb 2.0).

I attempted to install .NET v2.0 on our previous server a few weeks back for the InstantKB.NET 2.0 online demo and it basically brought the server to it's knees. This is the reason the kb 2.0 online demo was hosted at a separate IP address (on our new servers). We had to move to the new servers before we could start using InstantKB.NET 2.0 for our own knowledgebase which we've always done before release previously as a final test. As the server transfer was required we also updated the site with the new design we've been working on for the last couple of months.

- Beta 4 Download

With the server transfer and site update now complete you expect more regular updates from me on InstantKB.NET 2.0. I've ensured we've continued to make progress with 2.0 during the site update & transfer however i have been a little slow on updates here due to the move.

It's clear from feedback you want another download. We are working towards a forth and hopefully final beta for Weds Nov 28th. A release candidate or possibly the final release (depending on feedback) will be available a week or two after beta 4.

The forth beta will be 99% feature complete .With the forth beta we'll ensure you will have the ability to upgrade from the BETA to the RC and/or final release. This will ensure you can get started with the beta by the end of Nov and will have the option to upgrade to the final version once available a few weeks after.

One difficult decision i've made over the last week is to remove the ticketing system for the final InstantKB 2.0 release. The email integration we want to provide for the tickets won't be possible in our timeframe. We will of course continue to work on the ticketing system and you can expect to find this within a update shortly after the 2.0 final release.

We are working on a method to reliably poll a POP3 server to pull and parse email on that server into InstantKB.NET. We are working to provide a rules engine & UI to apply actions, escalations or workflow steps to any email content received by InstantKB.NET. We'll continue to develop this feature and i'll ensure i post regular updates on when to expect the ticketing system (i know some of you really wanted this for the 2.0 final release).

We'll also be going live over the next few days with our latest build of InstantKB.NET 2.0 at for our own knowledgebase at http://kb.instantasp.co.uk/

The site update and server transfer is something we've been planning for a while.

As you can see we've recently gone live with a new web site on our own co-located hardware. I've also been working to ensure we have InstantKB.NET 2.0 ready for the end of Nov.

InstantForum.NET 4.1.4 SP2

We'll be offering a small service pack for InstantForum.NET 4.1.4 to resolve some of the issues reported here within the forums and via email over the last couple of months. I don't have an exact date yet however i'll ensure i keep customers updated.

InstantForum.NET 4.2

Early next year we'll have the next version of InstantForum.NET available. I added a post a few weeks back on what you can expect to find however i've added this here again to ensure everyone is kept upto date. We would certainly consider requests at this stage for the next update. You can post and discuss any suggestions or requests here within the forums i do read them.

Our current goals for v4.2 based on user feedback and our own observations.

- Our Goals...

• Similar to InstantKB.NET 2.0, InstantForum.NET4.2 will move to .NET v2.0 and will be provided as a file based (no IIS dependency) Visual Studio.NET 2005 solution by default. Although v4.1 will work in both Visual Studio .NET 2003 and 2005 under .NET v1.1 or .NET v2.0 there are a number of features we want to take advantage of in .NET v2.0 (SQL cache dependencies, ajax extensions, masterpages & themes to name a few).
• v4.2 will move to 100% strict W3c valid XHTML for all client markup. We'll also be improving accessibility (508) and screen reader support. All layout will be archived via CSS using DIV layers and you'll see a move towards much more semantic markup. You can see an example of this by taking a look at the HTML for our forthcoming InstantKB.NET v2.0 update at http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantKB20/

v4.2 will support virtual URL rewritting so we can finally have the topic titles and forum names within the URLs. Again an example of this can be seen within our InstantKB.NET v2.0 preview.

• v4.2 will have an improved paging system (again currently used within InstantKB.NET v2.0) for further performance navigating massive record sets  We'll also be offering the option to enable ajax based paging of all paged data.
• Integration with InstantKB.NET v2.0. The ability to share users and roles across both the knowledge base and forum. We'll also be looking at other ideas for integration between the two products.
• We want to introduce further downloadable skins and language packs. With v4.2 will be making an effort to consolidate all skins, language packs and addons into a single resource.

We'll be removing dependencies within our public business methods on the HttpContext object. This has puzzled many users taking advantage of our API and we'll be improving this area. For example the InsertPost method.

• - Based on user feedback for v4.2 you can expect...
• v4.2 will support 2 additional WYSIWYG editors out-the-box. The option to add further editors will be provided and we'll be working to offer support for additional editors after the v4.2 release.
• v4.2 will contain an archive function for older posts. You'll have the ability to define rules and automatically archive messages when certain conditions are meet. This will work for posts and PMs.
• We'll be extending the available RSS feeds and providing out the box controls to consume those feeds. For example if you wanted to display the latest 10 or 20 global posts on your home page or maybe only the most popular posts from the last week within a specific forum.
• We'll be looking at offering the ability to store post attachments on the file system and not within the database. This will be configurable based on your situation. If SQL space is expensive you can use the file system.

Option to hide buttons which are not applicable to the current user.

• Ability to split & merge topics
• A ajax based quick reply feature
• You'll also see various improvements within the UI with more use of Ajax for inline editing and moderation.

- Things we would like to include but i can't promise currently...

• Tagging for posts with Tag Cloud and RSS feeds for each tag. Support for users to tag posts. This will be configurable via permission sets and could be disabled if desired.
• Custom Fields for registration and forum posts. We've already developed this within our InstantASP.Common framework and will be porting this functionality over to the forum ASAP.
• Payment gateway and subscription features for private forums.
• Improved search with ability to link to search results and subscribe to RSS feeds for search results.
• Ajax based autosave / draft functionality when composing posts or PMs. To prevent posts from getting lost due to session timeouts.
• Support for integration with DDN.

Ensure support for Visual Studio.NET 2008 / .NET v3.5

Provide signed assemblies for GAC installations

- Bug Fixes

You can of course also expect us to resolve a number of minor issues we've learnt over the last few moths. There is a problem with post formatting when switching between FireFox & IE to edit posts. Also an access with attachments within private messages sometimes not working correctly if you choose to save a copy of the sent message. I also have a list within our defect tracking tool we'll be working through to ensure v4.2 is as stable as possible. We'll offer another service pack shortly after InstantKB.NET v2.0 to resolve some known issues whilst v4.2 is completed.

If you have any questions you can email me direct on ryan@instantasp.co.uk or post a topic here within the forum.


Kindest Regards,

Ryan Healey
Director / Developer

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http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/