InstantASP Blog

Going C# & ASP.NET 4.5 – oh my

Ryan Healey — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:14:06 GMT

Disclaimer: If you're not a developer using our products this post may not interest you. From a business / end users perspective our products will not change. Of course we are adding some great new features & improvements within the next releases to hopefully keep our business and end users excited.

We've been working on some significant changes quietly over the previous couple of months. It's Sunday so I thought I would take some time out to let you all finally know the big news.

For many years our products have been written in VB.NET. This was the natural choice for me when I developed the first versions of InstantForum & InstantKB coming from a VB6 / Classic ASP background – I'm showing my age here. Over the years things have evolved we've always tried to keep our products current but I've known for a little while now we need to take a step back and make some significant decisions to ensure we can continue to thrive far into the future.

Whilst VB.NET has served us well I think it's fair to say its popularity is in decline amongst the .NET community. There are many reasons for this which I won't go into here (it would take me a very long time) but ultimately we took the decision in late 2012 to start migrating our core common libraries and all product specific source code over to C#.
So going forward we will continue to support our existing VB.NET customers however InstantForum , InstantKB & Influx will be provided in ONLY C# from the next major release of each product.

Phew- I'm nervous telling you all this – it's a bold decision but we feel the right move.

I'm both sad and excited about this news. I loved VB for many years it's what got me started in the VB6 days but nowadays it's a little verbose compared too many other languages. For me personally C# is much more productive and naturally lends itself towards cleaner, easier to read code. I think this view is shared by many developers which is why C# has become the predominant .NET language over the years. This is of course just my personal opinion. I've been know n to be wrong :P

Whilst migrating our code to C# we've also took the opportunity to do some major refactoring and some fairly significant architectural changes. Some areas of our code were becoming dated. These areas were often difficult to maintain or extend slowing us and our customers down during development.
We really wanted to address this and take advantage of newer features available in the .NET framework (generics, extension methods, C# dynamics) to have less boiler plate code throughout our framework and ultimately provide a more productive experience for developers working with or extending our products.

There are really only two major architectural changes at this point globally throughout the code as we didn't want to introduce to many bugs. We've also made lots of little changes to improve and clean our existing code. To help I've detailed the changes you can expect to see soon below…

New Data Access Layer

We've rewritten our data access layer to introduce the unit of work and repository patterns. These design patterns are popular in many modern ORM tools and MVC apps. We've opted to stay clear of using any type of full blown ORM – ef, linq-to-sql for performance reasons. We are still working very close to the metal with the native SqlClient classes however we have now implemented IQueryable of T methods within our generic repository base class which will allow you to easily return strongly typed collections and filter further using linq queries. The new DAL also requires significantly less code to wire up basic CRUD operations which will make it easier to use going forward.

Abstraction

One of the problems that bothered me with our existing code base was its lack to extensibility. We really didn't follow the open closed principal very well. We would often have a customer ask if they can change how a specific piece of functionality works without having to modify the core code and most of the time we would need to say you'll need to modify the code. Whilst we offer a plug-in model this only really interacts with the UI and provides little access to underlying functionality.

We've now introduced the concept of interchangeable providers for core services. Think of these similar to the membership providers you can swap in ASP.NET. For example if you wanted to change how our data caching or scheduling worked or swap out how and where user data was stored (in your own persistence layer) this should now be possible with our new provider model.

As a developer you can optionally define your own provider classes within the web.config. You simply add your class type that will be instantiated for the specific provider. This class will inherit from our relevant provider's abstract base class leaving you free to add your own concrete implementation for the provider. We are taking this approach throughout our updated code base where it makes sense to abstract the implementations and generally make our code more flexible going forward.

Readability Improvements

We've removed all fully qualified namespace references within classes (replacing these with using statements at the top) to make for better readability.

We've removed all unnecessary comments from the code. All those comments that state the obvious I.e. (open database connection, iterate through collection etc). We have left some comments to help explain the code when it's not immediately obvious.

Namespace, class & organizational changes

We've restructured our namespaces & some class names to bring these more inline with modern MVC naming conventions. Whilst we are not quite MVC yet we wanted to update our core libraries first to make this transition easier when the time comes.

Security Improvements

This one has been requested by quite a few customers and it's something I've been eager to get ready for a little while. We are now moving to salted SHA256 (with optional SHA512 support) for password hashing with our next major release. Existing customers won't be able to take advantage of this feature unless you perform a global password reset. We are hoping to provide migration steps towards release to help each the transition. Stay tuned.

Moving to ASP.NET 4.5

We are now leveraging the ASP.NET WebAPI controllers introduced in in MVC 4 to provide a rest based services layer. Going forward our products will require ASP.NET 4.5.

Will the next update include a MVC web project?

No sorry. We would love to offer a MVC version of our software. Unfortunately with the next release we won't be quite ready however the changes we've made so far will help for the future. This is very much on the road map and we hope to have news soon. We've been doing lots of work with MVC 4 recently to sharpen our skills for when the time comes.

Will these changes break the current API?

No. We've deprecated all methods and marked these as obsolete with comments within the existing API pointing you towards the new methods. You can still use the deprecated methods and they will return the expected results.
Will I be able to upgrade from the current VB.NET products to the new C# versions?
Yes absolutely. We'll have documentation to assist with this once released. Infect our C# update will be a free update once released to any customers that purchase our products from today.

I love VB and still use it as my primary language in projects. What about me?

It's been a tough decision to move towards C# and not something we have taken lightly. We will continue to support our VB.NET versions and will offer hotfixes for any significant issues far into the future. I'm sincerely sorry if you are a VB.NET developer and don't like this news. We feel the time is right now to make the transition. We are only a small team so I'm afraid we really have to choose between C# or VB.NET we can't maintain two separate versions of each product going forward.

To help we'll be ensuring we provide any published code samples in both C# & VB.NET going forward. Of course you can still reference our C# assemblies from your VB.NET projects or add our C# projects to your VB.NET solution and add project references however if you wanted to modify our code directly this would require some C# knowledge. I think it's fair to say if you can write VB.NET you can write C# code also with very little work. There are many free tools available to help you convert code.

I hope the majority of you welcome this move towards C# as positive news. If you have any questions or comments as always please don't hesitate to email me directly, post your comments below or pop your thoughts in our community forums. I would love to hear from you.

We are close now to having a release we would be confident to call a beta. I look forward to posting further updates as quickly as we can and as always thank you all for your continued support,

New Documentation Skin + Improvements

Ryan Healey — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:37:06 GMT

We’ve gone live with our forthcoming InstantKB documentation skin within our own product documentation area here at http://docs.instantasp.co.uk/

This is only the first stag. We are often so focused on our products our documentation gets a little neglected. I think this is true for most software companies. We have some great documentation to assist with installation and configuration of our software however we are lacking in some of the more basic areas such as providing getting started guides or end user / administrator guides.

Over the coming weeks & months we’ll be improving our own product documentation to cover everything you need to know to get started & use our products.

Once we have completed the improvements to our general product documentation we will be starting work on a dedicated developer area on our web site. This will be similar to our product documentation however will be focused towards developers working with our software and will offer more in-depth technical articles & examples. This will include complete API documentation for our .NET API and forthcoming REST / JSON based API. We also want to provide many more examples and guides on how to extend, integrate & customize our products.

In a previous blog post I mentioned the idea of a marketplace or app store. We want to try and leverage some of the really talented developers & designers customizing our products to help us foster more or a community or ecosystem around our products. To achieve this we first need to offer the resources and support those developers will need to create great skins, themes, add-ons or apps for our products. The ultimate goal is to offer more choice & variety for our customers.

There are lots of things we want to do. We are only a small team so please give us a little time. You can rest assured we are spending every waking minute on improving our products and we’ll have something to show you all the moment we are confident you’ll be blown away.

I’ll continue to keep our blog updated as we progress. Thank you as always to all our customers who allow us to do what we love. Onwards with the mission to bring you the best ASP.NET community and customer support software available.

Announcing Visual Studio 2012 support

Ryan Healey — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:16:23 GMT

We are proud to announce our products work great with the latest Visual Studio 2012 release.

Both InstantForum 2012 and InstantKB 2011 can be opened within Visual Studio 2012 without any migration or upgrade wizard. You can modify our source code and recompile as normal.

If you do encounter any issues using our products within Visual Studio 2012 please see the articles linked below for further assistance or contact us.

Our new web site + news on our 2013 product updates

Ryan Healey — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 18:22:56 GMT

Some of you may have noticed we've recently gone live with our new web site and branding. I hope you all agree and think this is an improvement over our previous design.

We wanted to overhaul our designs across both our web site and products to bring this inline with the more modern windows 8 style. Our previous web site design was getting a little tied and to be honest was a little rushed at the time due to time constraints.

This time we've made no compromise, it’s took us many late nights to get things just the way we wanted however we are very pleased with the end result. I hope you find it easier to use.

Whilst we've been busy with our web site redesign we've not forgot about our products. We've been developing a few things quietly behind the scenes and will soon have something to show. To give you some idea of what to expect I’ll provide a little information for each product below.

Our updated site now runs a very early version of the forthcoming InstantForum 2013 release. We are using our own community to test some of the new features. We've simplified our community forums and merged all old forums into four separate forums (using the new bulk admin features in 2013). The previous structure was becoming a little confusing with to many forums.

Our forthcoming 2013 update will include a complete overhal to our CSS reducing dependencies on images, using newer native CSS 3.0 features instead meaning fewer requests and quicker load times. Moving towards CSS to completely control the colors (no gradient background images etc) is part of our larger strategy to offer a visual theme editor & marketplace within both InstantForum & InstantKB. I’ll be posting further news on this soon.

We've recently posted news on our forthcoming service desk product named Influx. Influx allows you to manage enquirers received vie email or the web and is designed to help track, automate & streamline your customer communications. Think of it as email evolved.

We want to keep our products simple & focused so took the decision last year to separate our current ticketing features within InstantKB into a separate product.

We started by developing a new user interface to manage cases. We wanted to make the interface as responsive as possible and make better use of the real estate available on the page. Influx is our first product to feature a SPA (Single Page Application) interface.

Once you arrive on the main Influx page everything is loaded asynchronously. There are no full round trips to the web server making for a very productive environment to manage cases. We also really wanted to improve the search and make this available on screen at all time. We took this a step further and now search in real-time as you type within Influx.

We then developed our own high performance POP3 mail client to communicate with a mail server and download emails into Influx. Dealing with the different types of email formats (text/html/multi-part) and encodings (base64/quoted-printable/mixed) was fun. Whilst not the most exciting work we didn't want to add a dependency on a 3rd party POP3 mail library so took the decision to develop this ourselves within our InstantASP.Common framework.

It only took us a week or two to get the basic mail client downloading and adding emails to Influx but accommodating for all the various edge cases & types pf encoding with email took much longer. One thing I learnt from this process – developing a reliable POP3 client is not a trivial task.

The next challenge was to weed out the spam we all receive so you are only left with genuine cases from customers. To do this we perform a number of checks against all incoming emails. All new messages are first run through our bayesian spam filter which will learn over time based on the messages in your spam folder and messages in your inbox. This will associate a spam probability weight with the message. You can train the bayesian filter at any time from the admin control panel. Next we check if you've banned the mail server or sender. If you ever respond to an email we’ll add the recipient to your safe senders list so these are never blocked. You can of course fine tune how all the mail settings work from within the Influx admin CP.

We are very excited about Influx and already use an early version to manage our own customer support and web site communications. We are finding improvements everyday and hope to have a public beta a little later this year. You can read more or sign up for our beta here.

As I mention above we want to keep our products simple & very focused so for the next InstantKB release you can expect to see many improvements around content management, creation & user feedback. We will continue to support and develop our current web based ticketing features within InstantKB however we won’t be improving this in any significant way with our next release. You can find a brief list of what we are working on below.

Instead we are focused on making it easier to import, improve, audit and collaborate on content within InstantKB. We’ll be adding bulk import options to allow you to quickly build your knowledgebase from an existing repository. We have a early wiki style system in development for articles to offer change history, auditing and rollback options.

We've improved the user feedback area at the bottom of articles (still in test) to help you identify which articles need improving. The 5 star rating system is great but there is more we can do. We are also working on a new notes feature that will allow you to add notes directly in-line within the article editor. These notes are only visible to staff members. These can be used to add feedback in a review workflow or just general staff only notes. No need for a custom field to capture reviewer feedback.

We also want to make it easier to navigate & configure permissions and workflows so you can expect to see improvement in this area.

You'll find several new reports to provide better insight into how your customers are using your knowledgebase. For example reports to show what your customers are searching for , reports to show the most popular articles or categories, All reports will offer the ability to set a start and end date. If you wanted to learn what your customers are searching for around a product release this would make it very easy.

We are also ensuring InstantKB integrates well with Influx if installed together.

All these new features are great and we have many more planned but what’s the bigger picture. For us there are some key areas we are going to be focused on across all our products going forward. To help you understand what’s important to us I've included my top ten lists below in no particular order (just yet)…

1. Mobile support across all our products (both responsive design & native feel skin options)
2. Windows & SQL Azure support across all our products
3. Online Marketplace (skins, themes, plug-ins, language packs, user controls) for all our products
4. Marketplace browser (one click install / share skins, plug-ins) within all products
5. Restful JSON & JSONP based CRUD services for all our products
6. Web Platform installer support & improved installation experience across all our products
7. Further integration points between all our products if installed side by side
8. Out the box integration into 3rd party apps (SharePoint, DNN, Umbraco)
9. Better documentation examples and API information for all our parodists
10. Improved reporting features across all our products (provide better insight)

We don’t have any firm release dates just yet however you can be assured we’ll have something to show the moment we are happy with our work. Things have taken a little longer than usual between releases recently due to the new product development with Influx and re-branding of our web site but normal release cycles will resume now these projects are near completion. You can expect more frequent releases this year.

I hope this little update was helpful and answers some of your questions. Of course if you need have any questions or comments I would love to hear your feedback.

Post any comments (good or bad) below within the comments section, email me directly, use our contact form or post within our community forums. I look forward to posting further updates very soon.

Take care for now and as always thank you all for your continued support.

A sneak peak at InstantKB.NET 2012

Ryan Healey — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:06:58 GMT

I hope everyone is well.

Whilst we are still a little way off from our first InstantKB.NET 2012 beta I wanted to quickly share a screen grab showing the new ticket & email management features coming with our 2012 update…

I'm super excited about this update. Mainly because we've addressed the single most requested feature since our 2011 update. That is email support. With InstantKB.NET 2012 you can now manage & respond to customer support emails (or any type of emails for that matter) right from within InstantKB.NET. Yay :)

As you can see from the screen grabs we are already using a early release internally to manage evaluation requests coming from our web site. Please bear in mind the screen grabs show sample data as we are still very much in development. This would typically be a support requests from a customer.

To help manage the large volume of enquiries received as a result of opening InstantKB.NET to email we've redesigned the ticket management interface with the single goal of making it extremely quick & easy to organize, assign and identify which issues need action from you.

The screen grabs don’t' reflect this however we have also rewritten the ticket management interface from the ground-up taking advantage of several responsive design techniques to provide a really snappy quick interface. I can't wait to get a demo online to demonstrate this.

To combat spam (as InstantKB.NET can now check your email) we have a bayesian filter (which you can train if required) alongside other checks on the mail server IP to auatomtcaily move messages above a specific customizable spam threshold to your Junk mail folder. You can see the options for setting up a mail server within InstantKB.NeET below…

You may notice how you can choose to move emails to a specific tab within InstantKB.NET. This allows you for example to create a new custom tab called "Bugs" and have any emails addressed to "bugs@yourcompany.com" appear within this tab.

We have lots of other improvements coming in 2012 that I've not touched on here. I'll save these for another post. I'll be working to post updates here as development continues.

We are keen to get early feedback from our customers. Whilst we don't have a beta yet if you would like to express your interest in helping us once the beta is available please email me on ryan@instantasp.co.uk or use our feedback form . We would welcome your assistance.

If you have any general comments please don't hesitate to post below or use the contact methods above.

I look forward to posting further news on our InstantKB.NET 2012 update very soon.

InstantForum.NET 2012-1 Download

Ryan Healey — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:12:18 GMT

Ihope everyone is well. We've been helping lots of our customers upgradetheir existing InstantForum.NET installations to the latest 2012 updatesince it's release late December. So far your feedback has been verypositive.

However as with all software we have discovered someminor bugs since the 2012 release. To resolve these I'm delighted toannounce our InstantForum.NET 2012-1 update is now available fordownload. This is a maintenance update to resolve the bugs we'vediscovered since the initial 2012 release.

To learn more about the updates and how to upgrade please see the following article…

http://docs.instantasp.co.uk/Docs/InstantForum.NET-2012-to-2012-1

Our2012-1 update is available free of charge to all existingInstantForum.NET 2012 customers and will automatically be available fromyour Licenses page within your My.InstantASP account.

We havenot introduced any major new functionality with this release as wewanted to focus on reducing the bug count. Once we are confident our2012 release is as robust as possible we'll have a more substantialfeature update. We have a number of exciting improvements & ideas onour road-map but want to first ensure 2012 is a high quality release.

Wehope you enjoy the 2012-1 update and would suggest upgrading if you'vecountered any of the problems below. We've also introduced improvedright to left layout support in this update for Arabic customers.

2012-1 Improvements

- Added improved right to left skin, only one change required to the CSS now
- Added sample skin that tailors InstantForum.NET to work in smaller width constraints, 850pixels.
- Added .NET 4.0 support / specific web.config file
- Added ability to quickly link a URL within the editor in Chrome (similar to the Gmail editor)
- Improved CurrentCulture call on all pages for improved performance

2012-1 Fixes

- Fixed issue that prevent topics from being printed if anonymous access we denied to the forum containing the topic
- Fixed issue sending PMs if Max Number of Recipients was set to 0 in permission set
- Fixed issue with [code] and [quote] blocks when posted in Chrome not ending correctly
- Fixed an object reference error in mobile skin if you hidden certain controls via a permission set
- Fixed issue with private messages if you entered ", ," in the username field
-Fixed issue which prevented live preview from showing all your messageif the message contained "&" in the underlying HTML
- Fixed issue that didn't allow you to align text within the editor in Chrome
- Fixed issue which cased link text to disappear when editing links in Chrome
- Fixed a number of incorrect color issues in dark skin on calendar page
- Fixed "promte" spelling error in Like Pop-Up
- Fixed issue with event last edited by label not showing text correctly

We hope you enjoy the update. Thank you as always to everyone for your support. I look forward to posting further updates soon,

InstantForum.NET 2012 Preview Online

Ryan Healey — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:40:56 GMT

Hi All, Hope every one is well. We've been hard at work over the last few months on our next major InstantForum.NET update, InstantForum.NET 2012.

I'll be posting individual blog posts here over the coming days / weeks detailing the new features & improvements you'll find in our 2012 update however I'm a little excited and just can't wait any longer.

You can explore an online "early" demo of our next forum update at the link below…

http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantForum2012/

You can login as an administrator using the usual combination…

Email: admin@admin.com

Password: admin

Alternatively login using the new Facebook login - yay.

I know I've not posted since March (I can't believe that) but please do check back here often over the next few weeks as I'll be posting much more information on 2012 now we are only a week or two from our first public beta.

P.S. Don't forget to visit the link above on a mobile device. You'll get a whole new experience :)

12 tips to improve your customer support & save you time

Ryan Healey — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:26:20 GMT

We recently published a white paper containing 12 practical tips you can put to use right away to help provide a more responsive, well managed customer support experience. A few practical changes and improvements can help turn your customer support into relatively easy, painless process and can quickly result in happier customers and support staff.

You can read this paper below...

As always if we can assist with any questions please don't hesitate to pop a comment below or contact us.

We hope you find some if the tipcs helpful.

InstantForum.NET 2011 - Going Mobile

Ryan Healey — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 02:39:22 GMT

I'm excited to announce our forthcoming InstantForum.NET 2011 update will introduce mobile support.

Our primary focus will be to provide iPhone & iPad, support however we are designing the mobile skin in such as way that it will work just as well on Android, Windows Phone 7 & Blackberry devices.

Whilst this is still a web application we are developing the new skin to look & feel (as much as possible) like a native iPhone/iPad application. The skins will be more touch friendly and will focus on simplicity allowing you to quickly catch up and post quick messages on the go.

You can test drive this skin now. Simply visit our community forums on any mobile device.

It's still early days but I wanted to share with you some screen grabs of how this looks so far...

Yes. Visit our community forums on any mobile device to give the mobile skin a test drive. We would welcome any feedback as a response here within this topic.

Year. We will be providing options within the Admin CP to allow you as an administrator to select a specific skin to target a mobile or tablet device.

Yes. A mobile skin is just another skin within InstantForum.NET. As with all skins they can be customized through CSS, master page changes, editing the mark-up etc.

Using the WURFL device database via 51Degrees.mobi foundation.
http://51degrees.mobi/

While ASP.NET’s built-in browser detection support will be sufficient for many applications it will not recognize many of the latest devices unless you manually update e the browser definition files.

For example even the .NET 4 browser definition files are not recent enough to recognize Windows Phone 7, Android phones, Opera Mobile browsers, or Apple iPads.

We choose 51Degrees.mobi foundation as the foundation is being continually updated to support new mobile devices and features requested by developers.

Once a mobile device has been detected InstantForum.NET will automatically load the correct skin. .

We look forward to posting further news as this moves to release :)

InstantForum.NET 2010-5 Update

Ryan Healey — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:24:53 GMT

Just a quick post to let you know we've just released InstantForum.NET 2010-5. This update is available now for download from within your My.InstantASP account. This update resolves a number of minor issues and addresses problems with both IE9 RC1 and FireFox 4 beta.

We'll be posting further information on this update and instructions on how to upgrade in our documentation area later today. We wanted to provide the 2010-5 update to address issues reported by customers and to prepare InstantForum.NET for the forthcoming IE9 and FF4 updates.

We've also made a number of performance / refactoring improvements throughout the and managed to defer (call when required) a couple of database queries to further speed page load times.

I'm afraid there are no new major features within this release. We simply wanted to ensure the current InstantForum.NET relapse is as stable as possible to allow us time to focus on InstantForum.NET 2011.

I would suggest waiting for our upgrade documentation before attempting to upgrade your installation to 2010-5. We will be posting a ZIP file containing only the updated files and a single SQL file to update your database.

I'll post official announcements within our community forums once everything is live :)

If you would like to try InstantForum.NET please register to download a fully functional evaluation here or if you ahve any questions please don't hesitate to contact us.

Happy Holidays from InstantASP

Ryan Healey — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:15:52 GMT

Just a quick post to wish everyone a very happy Christmas. Also a sincere thank you to all customers we've had the opportunity to work with in 2010.

We are super excited about 2011 and our users can expect major updates for both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET.

Anyhow I'm sure your all very busy with last minute Christmas shopping so I'll keep this short. We hope you have a wonderful Christmas and get to spend time to with friends & family.

Happy holidays & best wishes to all from InstantASP. We hope Santa leaves you something nice :)

Using InstantForum.NET 2010 Under .NET 4.0

Ryan Healey — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:18:16 GMT

Out the box InstantForum.NET 2010 currently targets the .NET 2.0 run-time and will work fine on .NET 2.0, .NET 3.5 & 3.5 SP1. We will be moving to .NET 4.0 out the box with future InstantForum.NET updates as more of our customers also move to .NET 4.0.

To help customers looking to use the InstantForum.NET 2010 releases under .NET 4.0 you can find below two web.config files you can use which will ensure InstantForum.NET works correctly under the .NET 4.0 run-time

If your running InstantForum.NET under a IIS 7 Integrated ASP.NET 4.0 application pool please download the "IFNET2010_Integrated_DotNet4.0_WebConfig.zip" file attached below. This contains a web.config which will work fine for .NET 4.0 Integrated Application Pools.

If your running InstantForum.NET within IIS6 or under a IIS 7 Classic ASP.NET 4.0 application pool please download the "IFNET2010_Classic_DotNet4.0_WebConfig.zip" file attached below. This contains a web.config which will work fine for .NET 4.0 Classic Application Pools.

Each download contains a single web.config file which you should use if your running under .NET 4.0. Don't forget you'll need to update the database connection string within the web.config to point to your InstantForum.NET database.

If you have any questions with regard to running our products under .NET 4.0 please don't hesitate to open a support ticket or contact us.

Auto Subscribing New Users to Forums By Email

Ryan Healey — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 18:34:26 GMT

Recently we've received the same question from several customers with regard to automatically subscribing new users to all forums via email within InstantForum.NET. This would ensure all members are sent an email each time a post is made within any forum they have access to.

We don't do this by default as it's generally best practice to allow your users to opt-in to email notifications however we understand some customers may be running InstantForum.Net within a controlled internal intranet We will be adding options in a future InstantForum.NET release to allow you to automatically subscribe your users to specific forums however whilst we work on getting this right I wanted to share some simple code which may help in the meantime.

I would only suggest using this code if you know your users won't mind being automatically subscribed to all forums by email. Generally for public facing web sites this is not a good idea as you may quickly annoy community members with unsolicited emails. Please use your judgement before deciding to apply this code.

To automatically subscribe new members you'll need to modify the registration code to call an additional method that will loop through forums and add a subscription automatically. To get started open your InstantForum.NET installation within Visual Studio.NET and locate the register page as shown below…

Open this class. You should see…

Adding Imports Statement

You'll need to add the an imports / using statement to InstantASP.InstantForum as shown below…

Add our New Method

One you've added the imports / using statement copy the code below and paste this above the QueueConfirmationEmails nethod as shown below….

Private Sub AutoForumSubscription(ByVal intUserID As Int32)  ' create forum object, pass current user id to ensure role based security is applied  Dim Forums As New Business.Forums(MyBase.CurrentContext.CurrentUser.UserID)  ' populate local forum collection  Dim fc As Collections.ForumCollection = Forums.SelectForums  ' check we have a forum collection  If Not fc Is Nothing Then      ' loop through forums      For index As Int32 = 0 To fc.Count - 1          ' get forum          Dim f As Components.Forum = fc.Item(index)          ' add forum Subscription          Business.Subscriptions.Forums.InsertSubscription( _          intUserID, f.ForumID, Common.Enumerations.EnumSubscriptionType.Instant)       Next  End IfEnd Sub

Calling the New Method

You will now need to call the new "AutoForumSubscription" method we have added when adding the user. Todo this locate the code below iwthin Register.vb.

User = New InstantASP.InstantForum.Components.User(intUserID)User.Authenticate(e.RememberMe)' quque confirmation emailQueueConfirmationEmails(User)

Add a call to the new "AutoForumSubscription" method we created as shown below…

User = New InstantASP.InstantForum.Components.User(intUserID)User.Authenticate(e.RememberMe)' quque confirmation emailQueueConfirmationEmails(User)' auto subscribe to all forumsAutoForumSubscription(User.UserID)

That's It

When new members register on your site now they will automatically be subscribed to all forums and will receive an email notification anytime a new post is made within any forum the user has access to.

Any questions as always please don't hesitate to contact us.

InstantKB.NET 2011 Video Overview

Ryan Healey — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:01:05 GMT

We recently released our InstantKB.NET 2011 update. This is a major update and offers a number of new features we are confident will help your company more effetely manage your customer support.

We've put together a short 2 minute video highlighting some of the key features & improvements you can find within our latest InstantKB.NET 2011 update. To learn more please click the play button below :)

Thank you to everyone who assisted in providing feedback during our recent InstantKB.NET BETA. We are hard at work on the next updates for both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET and I hope to be posting further news soon.

InstantKB.NET 2011 BETA 1 - Online Demo

Ryan Healey — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 02:46:00 GMT

Hi All,

Hope your all very well. I'm delighted to announce you can now test drive the forthcoming InstantKB.NET 2011 release via our online demo at…

http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantKB2011

To login as and administrator please use…

Email: admin@admin.com
Password: admin

This demo shows the forthcoming ticketing support. You'll notice you can also submit bugs within the online demo via the "Submit Bug" tab. This tab demonstrates how you can extend ticket tabs & create your own tabs to capture unique important to your business. As with other data entry forms you can custmoize the fields displayed to users under any tab & add custom fields to capture unique data.

If you visit the Staff CP (accessible via the top-right once logged in as an administrator) you'll notice a new set of features to help you manage user submitted content.

Within the Admin CP you can define service level agreements to help manage customter expectation or define automated rules & escalation rules which can execute based on specific conditions or workflow stages to help automate & streamline the support process.

We are very excited about the possibilities with this new release and I could ramble on for hours. For now I'll let you play with the demo and discover the new features in your own time,

Please remember of course this is a BETA release so if you encounter any problems or indeed have any questions please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk or use our contact form.

Stay tuned for some further news regarding a revamp of our web site here at InstantASP. We expect this will be around the same time as the 2011 BETA 2 release.

I look forward to any feedback and keeping you all posted during the BETA :)

InstantKB.NET - Looking for BETA testers

Ryan Healey — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:52:05 GMT

We've been hard at work recently getting the next major InstantKB.NET update ready .

This update contains a number of improvements. For a complete list please see http://instantasp.co.uk/Products/InstantKB/InstantKB2010.aspx

I'm excited to announce today we'll be offering a BETA download to existing InstantKB.NET 2.x customers this coming Monday 11th October.

If your interested in receiving a copy of the latest InstantKB.NET BETA please email sales@instantasp.co.uk and we'll confirm via email if eligible. For those who provide feedback during the BETA a free update will be provided once the next InstantKB.NET update reaches RTM.

Thank you to everyone who has already registered for the BETA. We look forward to sending further information & download instructions this coming Monday.

I look forward to posting further news on the next InstantKB.NET update very soon :)

Common keywords & SQL Server full-text search

Ryan Healey — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:41:26 GMT

We spent some time recently helping a InstantKB.NET customer. The customer was seeing unexpected search results within InstantKB.NET when using SQL Server full text search & a Boolean "ALL / AND" keyword search..

Unexpected Search Results

The client had an article titled "Bill me later" however when searching for the keywords "Bill me later" there was no results shown. Using a "ANY / OR" Boolean search seems to work fine.

After some investigation it appears the problem occurs due to the list of common keywords SQL Server maintains internally.

SQL Server Noise / Stop Words

SQL Server 2005 calls them noise words, SQL Server 2008 calls them stop words. SQL Server has a list of around 150 common words, which are ignored by the Full Text Search engine. e.g. about, this, all, me, was, and, must etc. You can view the English stop words in SQL Server 2008 by executing the following query:

select * from sys.fulltext_system_stopwords where language_id = 1033
Because “me” is a stop word and we are performing a Boolean “AND” search we won’t get any results as the query is terminated when we hit the keyword “me”. This does not seem to effect “ANY / OR” type Boolean searches so I can only guess these are executed in a different fashion.

Solution?

There is a workaround – to wipe the list of stop words! The problem with doing this is that the list of stop words is setup server-wide on the SQL Server itself.

If this is not an option I’ve attached below a script to add all common stop words to the your InstantKB.NET Ignored search terms table ensuring the stop words never get passed to the full-text query engine. This ensures the query won’t get halted half way through the boolean search returning no results.

For InstantForum.NET users you can simply change the ApplicationID within the script attached below to 1.

To demonstrate this take the following full-text query…

SELECT (a.ArticleID)
FROM
InstantKB_Articles AS a
LEFT OUTER JOIN
ContainsTable(InstantKB_Articles, *, '"*later*" AND "*bill*"', 500) AS ftArticleTitle
ON a.ArticleID = ftArticleTitle.[Key]
WHERE
a.ArticleID IN (IsNull(ftArticleTitle.[Key],0))
This will return the article titled “Bill Me Later”. However if we add the common keyword “me” the exact same query will fail…

SELECT (a.ArticleID)
FROM
InstantKB_Articles AS a
LEFT OUTER JOIN
ContainsTable(InstantKB_Articles, *, '"*later*" AND “me*” AND "*bill*"', 500) AS ftArticleTitle
ON a.ArticleID = ftArticleTitle.[Key]
WHERE
a.ArticleID IN (IsNull(ftArticleTitle.[Key],0))
You’ll notice the second query returns no results as it’s being terminated once it hits the "me" stop word.

To resolve this please run the attached SQL script against your InstantKB.NET database.

Once you’ve ran the attached script against your InstantKB.NET database please recycle the web application within IIS to clear the local ASP.NET cache and ensure the new ignored search terms are being used by InstantKB.NET.

If you do run into any other scenarios where you would expect to see search results it may be due to these common keywords. You can add your own terms to the list of ignored search terms used by InstantKB.NET from within the Admin CP > Settings > Ignored Search Terms page.

I hope this blog entry helps someone :)

InstantForum.NET 2010-4 Released

Ryan Healey — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:39:33 GMT

After several weeks of discussion within our community forums & a number of revisions I'm delighted to announce our InstantForum.NET 2010-4 update is now available for download to existing customers. Thank you to everyone who submitted feedback for the 2010-4 releaqse. Special thanks to Al, Ramsay, Eddy & Craig.

You can find a list of improvements, updates & fixes included within the 2010-4 release below.

Search Engine Optimized URLs

You can now easily enable search engine friendly URLs within InstantForum.NET.

This will transform the URLs to use forum names, topics titles & usernames within URLs whenever possible for SEO purposes.

Forum URLs

Topic URLs

Member / Vanity URLs

Back Button & Bookmark Support for AJAX Requests

With InstantForum.NET 2010-4 you can now use your bowsers back button support as you would in a traditional full post back web application. For more information please see my blog postAJAX is great but what about the back button?

Delete Attachments

When editing posts you can now delete attachments without the need to post back.

Abusive Post Reports

We've added a "Report" button to allow your community members to report abusive or spam posts to forum moderators.

New Admin Settings

Random Member Photos

You can now specify if a random member photo should be applied to new members.

Copy PMs to Sent Items

You can now always copy private messages to sent items. We felt from feedback we received this option was confusing for users. Now as an administrator you can simply choose to always copy private messages to members sent items folder.

Enable / Disable Tags

You can now disable tags if you don't require this feature from within the Forum settings page.

Show Quick Reply By Default

You now have the option to show the quick reply panel by default to ensure this is always visible for users who have permission to post within a forum.

Allow Hidden Roles

If you have lots of posts and don't have any hidden roles / member groups within InstantForum.NET you can now explictly disable hidden roles to improve query performance throughout InstantForum.NET.

Allow Similar Topics

Again for large scale communities you can optionally disable the Similar Topics displayed below a topic withyin InstantForum.NET. If your site is heavily indexed by search engines this can help reduce the load on your SQL Server.

General Improvements

We've reorganized a number of admin settings to make it easier for users to find application settings. For exapmple we've moved the CAPTCHA settings from the "Forum" settings page to the "Login & Registration" settings page. This makes more sense as the CAPTCHA verification code is only shown during registration.

2010-4 Fixes

Fixed issue with capctha code validation still taking effect even if capctha is disabled
Fixed issue with wrong signature appearing in post previews when editing
Fixed issue with quotes in topic titles & usernames being rendered with a preceding "\" character
Fixed issue with instant massager links within user profiles not working
Fixed issue with biography field not being updatable by admins
Fixed issue with private messages page if message usernames contained a quote character
Fixed issue with admin notes not updating if you cleared the richtext editor

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

You can find upgrade instructions within our online documentation at…

http://docs.instantasp.co.uk/Docs/InstantForum.NET-20103-to-20104

Should you have any questions with regard to upgrading please don't hesitate to open a support ticket, contact us or post within our community forums. We'll do our best to assist with any upgrade questions ASAP.

InstantForum.NET 2010-4 - You Asked, We've Delivered

Ryan Healey — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:25:51 GMT

SEO URLS

It's been clear from feedback within our own community forums since 2010 that you want to see search engine friendly URLs within InstantForum.NET. Whilst the basic URL rewriting works well and avoids the need for query stings within the forum URLs the URLS do not contain keywords relevant to the page to help improve your SEO efforts.

I'm pleased to announce today InstantForum.NET 2010-4 will offer very friendly URLs optimized to help improve the ranking of your topics & forums within search engines. Your forum & topic titles can now be used within your URLs by enabling a single option within the InstantForum.NET Admin CP.

Here you can see an example of how URLs like when viewing a forum…

Or when viewing a topic…

Other Improvements

We've also made a number of other improvements within 2010-4. A brief list of additions & improvements you can expect to find within 2010-4 follows…

Your browsers back button will now work for all AJAX requests
We've added a number of new general settings allowing you to further customize how your forum works.
We've added some optimization settings to help improve search performance for very large communities
We've improved several key database queries to move away from sp_executesql calls & local SQL string variables
We've removed COPPA registration to simplify registration for both users & administrators

We are expecting the 2010-4 release in the next week or two. I will of course keep our blog updated with developments. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

InstantKB.NET 2010 - Coming Soon

Ryan Healey — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:16:13 GMT

Hi All, I'm very excited to share with you today the improvements you can expect to find within the forthcoming InstantKB.NET 2010 update. Whilst we are still a few weeks from the first public beta you can find a detailed list of all the improvements we in 2010 below…

http://instantasp.co.uk/Products/InstantKB/InstantKB2010.aspx

As always if you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to respond below or email m directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

I look forward to posting further news ASAP :)

AJAX is great but what about the back button?

Ryan Healey — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 03:46:46 GMT

With the release of InstantForum.NET 2010 many of you will know we moved to a JavaScript & JSON (no-post backs) based approach for the InstantForum.NET user interface.

Whilst this move provides a very responsive interface & avoids a full page post back using compact JSON based web services to perform partial page updates there are obvious concerns with replying so heavily on JavaScript & partial page updates.

It's been obvious recently due to the volume of feedback I've received that you would like to be able use your browsers back button within InstantForum.NET as you would expect within a traditional non-AJAX web application as well as bookmark pages that are generated as a result of AJAX callbacks.

It's more challenging to enable the back button for AJAX based web applications as you need to manually manage the state of the page between callbacks & manually update the browsers address bar to reflect the current state of the page and allow users to bookmark pages.

With the recent 2010-3 update on Monday we've greatly reduced the bug count and currently are only aware of a handful of issues we still need to investigate.

We wanted to address the most common problem we see first. I'm delighted to say we've made great process with the bookmarking & back button issues we've seen reported

With the next update of InstantForum.NET you'll be able to bookmark pages even after an AJAX callback. For example you may wish to bookmark an advanced search page or a specific page within a forum or on the member list.

Even though these features use AJAX to call JSON based web services and a full post back is never performed of the page you'll be able to bookmark AJAX post backs with all controls maintaining stage when you come to the forum from your bookmark.

For example click here.

Whilst this URL looks nasty the value after the # within the URL is all generated by JavaScript and never seen by search engines. It's based on the jQuery Back Button Query plig-in.

Back Button (We've not forgot about you)

Your back button will work as expected in the next InstantForum.NET update.

To test the back button works as expected click the link below…

http://community.instantasp.co.uk/Recent.aspx

Click a few pages within the list of results or change the sort order of results.

When you navigate to a new page use your browser back button to return to the page. You'll notice that even though the page is only partially updated via our JSON web services the state is maintained and your browsers back button works as you would expect in a traditional full post-back web application.

What about SEO with JavaScript UI?

We tackled the SEO issues early in the 2010 development cycle and always provide SEO friendly links for any clients / bots that can't interpret JavaScript. We use widely considered best practices for doing this.

We are always keen to improve things and will be looking at further ways we can offer better support for clients who don't have JavaScript enabled.

I look forward to posting further information soon. I should probably go it's 3.45 in the morning - oh boy :)

Further improvements to online documentation

Ryan Healey — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:31:14 GMT

Hi All, Hope everyone is very well. We've been hard at work recently improving our online documentation for both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET.

Some of the new areas include…

I also wanted to share with you the new search within our online documentation. Our documentation search will also now pull in results from our knowledgebase & community forums via the RSS feeds they expose.

To make it even easier to find the information your looking for we've added a search box to our main support page allowing you to quickly search all our online documentation, knowledgebase articles & community discussions…

Searching for "Installing InstantForum" we get the following results…

We hope these improvements will help our users quickly locate the information relevant to any problem or feature within either InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET. You can try the search for yourself at the link below...

http://www.instantasp.co.uk/Support/

Whilst we've made great progress we do still want to add additional content to the online documentation in the form of user guides for end users, administrators & staff / moderators providing more of high level overview of features and options within the software. You can expect to see these over the coming weeks.

We'll be publishing an example of how we implemented this search & consumed the InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET RSS feeds to display results in a forthcoming article within our documentation.

We look forward to improving the documentation & completing the additional areas. I will of course keep the blog updated with developments.

New Online Documentation Area Coming Soon

Ryan Healey — Tue, 18 May 2010 17:40:14 GMT

Hi All, Hope your all very well.

I just wanted to share with you the new documentation area we are developing to help our customers get the most from InstantForum.NET and InstantKB.NET.

Alongside traditional installation & configuration information we are developing a number of user guides for both InstantForum.NET & InstantKB.NET to help end users, administrators, moderators & content authors quickly get started with either InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET. Other topics will cover areas such as localization, customization, extensibility & integration. We'll also be creating more in-depth developer focused content to cover common questions.

The new documentation area is built upon the forthcoming InstantKB.NET 2010 release (still early alpha). We've designed the new documentation area to provide a simple, easy to navigate way to browse the product documentation. This view (table of contents on the left & content on the right) will be available on a per tab basis with the InstantKB.NET 2010 release.

You can take an peek at our new documentation area below. Click the image to view a larger version.

You can also take a look at the early content at http://docs.instantasp.co.uk/

We'll be announcing here in the blog once the new documentation area is fully live.

Your feedback would be sincerely appreciated. If you would like to see us cover any specific areas within the new documentation please don't hesitate to leave your suggestions below or email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

Google Maps Plug-in for InstantForum.NET 2010

Ryan Healey — Sun, 09 May 2010 15:46:59 GMT

Hi All, As part of the forthcoming InstantForum.NET plug-in documentation & samples we've been developing a number of cool little plug-ins for InstantForum.NET. As well as being functional these plug-in samples will also serve as a learning tool demonstrating key concepts of plug-in development as well as offering sample code showing how your plug-in can directly manipulate the host page & as well as injecting a plug-in onto any specific page or location.

One of these plugs-in directly modifying the InstantForum.NET "Who's Online" page to add a Google map with markers representing all your visitor locations. This plug-in works by taking the IP address from the InstantForum_WhosOn database table, we then use the GeoCityLite API to get latitude and longitude coordinates for the IP address. Finally we use the Google Maps API to add Markers & Info Windows to the map showing all visitor locations....

Test Drive Online

Whilst not 100% accurate this plug-in offers a neat alternative view to your communities "Who's Online" page. You can see this plug-in in action at http://community.instantasp.co.uk/WhosOn.aspx

This plug-in along with a number of other samples will be available for download very soon. Please keep an eye on our blog for further information. If you have any suggestions for plug-ins you'd like to see for either InstantForum.NET or InstantKB.NET please don't hesitate to send your suggestions to me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

I look forward to posting further information very soon :)

Twitter Login with InstantForum.NET 2010-2

Ryan Healey — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:13:53 GMT

We've been hard at work on our latest InstantForum.NET 2010-2 update. Whilst the primary focus of this release has been to resolve issues reported since the last update we have taken time to add Twitter login support a highly requested feature. We'll be adding the option to logon via Facebook in future updates.

Our goal is to make it easier for your users to get started within your community. If they already have an existing Twitter account users can now use this to login to InstantForum.NET. With 2010-2 you'll find a new Twitter button on the login page...

Simply click the Twitter button to login at Twitter.com...

Once logged in via Twitter you'll be taken back to the forum. If this is the first time you've used twitter to login you'll be prompted to create a forum account as shown below...

By default we'll use your Twitter username also as your forum username. If this username is already taken within the forum by another member you'll be prompted to provide a new username...

If the username is not already taken you'll automatically skip this step and will be returned to the forum homepage authenticated...

On future visits you can now simply click the "Twitter" button on the login page, enter your username & password on Twitter.com and you'll be redirected back to your forum logged in. We use standard Twitter OAuth token based authentication to achieve the shared login.

Stay tuned for further information on InstantForum.NET 2010-2 this week. We've also resolved over a dozen minor issues reported since the last release. We'll be publishing a complete list of fixes & improvements included in the 2010-2 release very soon. .

As always please don't hesitate to leave any comments below or join our community and leave your comments or email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk. I'll do my very best to respond ASAP.

I look forward to keeping you all udpated :)