InstantASP Blog

InstantForum.NET 2010 closed BETA now available

Ryan Healey — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:08:55 GMT

Just a quick post to let you know today we officially started the InstantForum.NET 2010 BETA. We've had over 60 customers apply to take part in this beta and we sincerely appreciate you all for offering to assist & take some time to ensure InstantForum.NET 2010 is a great release.

if you opted to assist with the BETA you should have already received your download link & information via email.

If your an existing customer and would like to assist with hte closed BETA please email sales@instantasp.co.uk and provide the email address you used to place your original order.

You can expect further news ASAP :)

Merry Christmas Everyone

Ryan Healey — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:18:19 GMT

Just a quick post to wish everyone a very happy Christmas. Also a sincere thank you to all the great customers we've had the opportunity to work with in 2009. We are super excited about 2010 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.

P.S. We'll be here during the holidays. We are working to ensure our InstantForum.ET 2010 update is ready for release at some point in Jan. If your an existing customer and have not already put your name forward to take part in the closed BETA and would like to take part please don't hesitate to email sales@instantasp.co.uk

Happy holidays & best wishes from InstantASP

iPhone / Mobile skin for InstantKB.NET 2.0.6

Ryan Healey — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:56:11 GMT

Hi All,

Hope your all very well. I just wanted to share some screen grabs of the forthcoming InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 iPhone skin.

This skin will be available for download to all existing InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 on Monday 16th November from within your My.InstantASP client are at http://my.instantasp.co.uk/MyLicenses.aspx

We'll be posting an additional blog post once the skin is available for download.

If you can't wait you can check out the skin in action now by pointing your iPhone or iPod Touch to http://kb.instantasp.co.uk/ If your using a blackberry storm device you should also get similar results.

This skin will be provided out-the-box with the InstantKB.NET 2010 release early next year.

We look forward to posting further information. If you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk, use or contact form or leave a comment below.

InstantForum.NET 2010 Dev Preview Updated

Ryan Healey — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:55:50 GMT

Wow 3 blog posts in one day - just typical - you don't see one for ages then three come at once :)

Errm seriously...

I'm delighted to announce the latest version of the forthcoming InstantForum.NET 2010 update has been added to our demo area. Whilst still not perfect this update is a significant improvement over our earlier development preview and is much more feature complete & reliable.

As this is a development preview you will likely encounter bugs (we are aware of many) however we'll be working fanatically over the coming weeks to ensure the product is as robust as possible for the first public closed BETA expected mid November.

You can access the updated development preview at...

http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantForum2010

As always you can login as an administrator using the login details below...

Email: admin@admin.com
Password: admin

We did hope to have a BETA with customers in October however we've experienced a couple of delays. Thank you to all the customers who have offered to assist with the BETA we'll be contacting you the moment we have a download available. This should not effect things to much and we are expecting to have the beta ready around mid November. We will be doing our very best to bring you the 2010 update early-mid December. This may vary based on BETA feedback.

I didn't want to wait any longer (I'm excited) and have updated the development preview to show how things are progressing.

Some of the changes you'll notice in this update...

OpenID, Google, Yahoo & AOL login options
New recently online users panel with AJAX member card
You'll notice the latest polls can be displayed on the homepage & within forums
Updated user control panel pages with tab navigation & following / followers pages
Update profile pages showing latest posts, followers & users your following
WYSIWYG editor is nearly complete bar a few issues around inserting links & images
You should notice general reliability improvements
Pinned topics within forums are now displayed correctly
You should notice general performance improvements

Whilst we are pleased with how things are progressing we do still have issues to resolve and as such this development preview does not indicate the final quality. We'll be resolving all current known issues & any new issues over the coming weeks and once we are confident with the reliability we'll be offering a closed BETA.

Thank you to Jason , Chris, Lenka, Robert, Steve, Vaibhav, Sean & Mark (I'm sure you know who you are) we'll be keeping you updated via email on the status of the first BETA.

Please feel free to explore and try the latest development preview. We would ask you don't report any problems at this stage as it's very likely we are already aware of the problem and it will be resolved ASAP.

We would of course welcome any general comments or questions around this update. You can email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk, use our contact form or simply post your comment below. We'll do our best to respond ASAP.

InstantForum.NET 2010 Active Directory Module

Ryan Healey — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:55:03 GMT

Hi All,

Hope your all very well. We often receive requests from customers looking to use InstantForum.NET with there existing Active Directory infrastructure. Unfortunately up to now we've not really been able to provide an out-the-box solution for InstantForum.NET 4.x.

To address this problem we've quietly been working away on an Active Directory module similar to the one offered for our InstantKB.NET product to ensure with the release of InstantForum.NET 2010 we'll be able to offer an reliable, easy to install module to provide Active Directory support for InstantForum.NET.

Part of this work also includes core improvements to our Active Directory libraries to provide support for multiple active directory domains one of the most requested features since our InstantKB.NET Active Directory module was released.

We are working to ensure the Active Directory module is available with the final release of InstantForum.NET 2010.

As always we'll be keeping this blog updated with developments.

We would welcome any comments or questions. You can email us on sales@instantasp.co.uk, use our feedback form or post a comment below. We'll do our best to respond as quickly as possible.

InstantForum.NET 4.2 Gets a New Name

Ryan Healey — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:43:43 GMT

Hi All,

Hope your all very well. First let me apologize for not posting for a little while. We've been heads down working non-stop on the next forum update.

We've recently been posting updates here within the blog & via twitter and referring to the next InstantForum.NET update as version 4.2.

I'm excited to announce today that we'll be changing the way we name future updates and moving towards a Visual Studio.NET / MS Office style naming convention using the current year to indicate major updates. You can expect a new product logo, graphics & text on our web site to indicate this very soon.

The forthcoming InstantForum.NET update will be InstantForum.NET 2010.

The next major InstantKB.NET update will be InstantKB.NET 2010 - early 2010.

We are making these changes for a number of reasons.

We want to move towards at least 1 major release each year with Service Packs throughout the year to resolve any minor issues.
We wanted to signify the amount of development investigated in this next InstantForum.NET update and don't feel 4.2 did it justice
We feel it's a little less geeky and a little more consumer friendly

What can i expect to find in InstantForum.NET 2010

AJAX / JSON based UI (reducing server load, minimizing page size & response times)
Improved search & search API (making it possible to subscribe, consume or link to results matching specific criteria)
Web Services layer for all key objects (JSON & XML supported with examples of how to consume this from your existing web site)
Post Tags (Similar to InstantKB.NET users can tag posts & navigate via a tag cloud)
Completely re-written cross-browser WYSIWYG editor with a focus on performance & ease of use for the end user
Support for multiple authentication providers (InstantASP, OpenID, Google, AOL, Yahoo, Active Directory)
Improved AJAX based User Control panel making it much easier for users to build a InstantForum.NET profile
Improved profile pages allowing you & others to quickly see your posts & followers
Twitter style following system (you can now follow friends within your community and get notified when they post)
Improved RSS support (several new feeds will be available and it will be possible to create your own feeds from search results)
Now uses standard ASP.NET master page
Shared login & roles with InstantKB.NET (if installed)
Quick Reply option when replying to posts
Improvements to how settings & permission data is stored. This will allow us to add new setting groups or permission set options without having to touch the database.
Single Sign On with InstantKB.NET 2010 (further integration to come in future updates)
Lots of mark-up & CSS optimizations
Lots of code refactoring & performance improvements

We are excited about these changes and the direction it will help us take the products in the future.

As always if you have any questions please don't hesitate to contact us on sales@instantasp.co.uk, use our contact form or post a comment below.

Why choose InstantASP hosted services?

Ryan Healey — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:59:58 GMT

I've just finished up another batch of support tickets, and one of the clients happened to mention that they were impressed at the speed of turnaround on their issues, and how helpful we've been since their service was set up (I'm not trying to blow our own trumpet here, so bare with me.) A certain part of me really wanted to just say "All in a days work ma'am" because, that's exactly what we're offering in our hosted services provision.

A lot of people mistake hosted services for "Hosting", but that's not it at all, compare our hosted services prices to any ASP.net/Windows based hosting company, and pound for pound, dollar for dollar, they'll blow us out of the water on price. Don't get me wrong, we have the equipment, the set up, and the skills to offer hosting. But when we looked at offering hosting for our customers, what we found is that hosting wasn't really what they needed.

Hosted services are designed and priced to take the technical completely out of the hands of the customer, so that business minds who identify a need for our products, can have them expertly installed, secured, maintained and looked after by us. No installation headaches, no IS department delays, no back and forth with our support team to identify the problem, then time to establish a fix.

When you place an order for hosted services, we take that order, process it, configure your account and application(s) on one of our high spec, secured servers within our redundant network, in our secure, high availabillity Datacentre, then install and test your application. Within 48 hours of receiving your order confirmation, the next thing you receive is an email, containing all the details and logon information for your new up and running Knowledgebase and Forum.

But it doesn't stop there. Having a problem with FTP? Emails not sending from your knowledgebase? Application responding sluggishly? Open a ticket in our ticketing system, and one of our hosting team will pick it up, and go straight to the source of the problem at the server level, investigate and repair the issue. No back and forth neccessary. Is the data you store in the KB business critical? Let us know, and we can arrange a more stringent backup scheme for your data, so that in case of failure, corruption or accident, we can restore that for you*

We do our very best to ensure that when a customer opts to have us host their application instances for them, that they only need worry about how to best leverage our solutions for their business, and this is no sales pitch or marketing exercise, I'm a product developer, and the member of staff tasked with designing, deploying and maintaining the hosted services system, and I'm passionate about delivering on the needs of our customers. Through designing and developing great products, and providing a first class hosted application solution.

Hosted services has been in design and development for over a year now, and we've had nothing but positive feedback on how our customers are finding it. So if you're less technically inclined or your IS department are too busy to configure and maintain one of our products for you, get in touch, we'd be happy to help.

* Additional charges may apply.

InstantForum.NET 4.2 BETA soon (looking for testers)

Ryan Healey — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:00:29 GMT

Hope everyone is very well.

I just wanted to keep you all posted on the status of the next InstantForum.NET update v4.2. We are still hard at work and aiming to have a closed BETA early Q4.

As we are getting close i'd like to invite any existing InstantForum.NET customers to participate in our closed BETA. If you would like to get your hands on the update early and also provide us with valuable feedback to ensure a great update please don't hesitate to email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk, contact us or of course you can leave a comment below with your contact information.

If you've not been following us on Twitter (why not :\) you may have missed some of the more recent screen grabs we've uploaded...

http://twitpic.com/ixpzj/full
http://twitpic.com/ixpyx/full
http://twitpic.com/h6vvd/full
http://twitpic.com/gfefg/full
http://twitpic.com/gfeb7/full

You can find more at http://twitpic.com/photos/InstantASP

I hope to hear from some of you soon and look forward to working with you to ensure 4.2 is the best release so far :)

Updates to My.InstantASP Client Area

Ryan Healey — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:04:48 GMT

Hey All,

I mentioned in my last blog entry that we were making more updates to My.InstantASP in order to better streamline our support ticket system and turnaround, and better facilitate service for our hosted services customers. I'm pleased to inform you all that this work is now completed.

Hosted services customers can now access their account details via the new 'My Hosting' Link within the My.InstantASP menu, although passwords must still be requested via support. We have also improved the searching and filtration of tickets, to automatically tag and highlight hosted services tickets, so that our hosting management personnel can identify and address hosting issues ASAP. It is for this reason that it is vital that hosted services customers raise new issues via the ticketing system unless for some reason My.InstantASP is unavailable.

For our regular customers, several optimisations, improvements and fixes have been added to My.InstantASP to improve the speed of the interface when lodging tickets, and streamline our process to enable us to turn support tickets around faster, improving our support provision to you the customer.

We're constantly making changes and alterations to our services and provision and are always pleased to hear customer feedback to allow us to make such improvements to better serve our customer base, as such we'd always be glad to hear from you, please feel free to comment on this blog entry with any additions you'd like to see in My.InstantASP in the future.

Data Centre Trip (Our hosted services rack)

Ryan Healey — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:07:12 GMT

We recently had to pop down to the data centre to perform some maintenance. During the stip we got some snaps of our hosted serivces rack which i wanted to share.

Some of you may be interested :)

Front Of Rack

Notice the under floor cooling :)

Back Of RackNice & Organized. Redundent cabling to ensure maximum uptime.

Arty Shot (slow exposure)

As you can see in the photos we currently only have three servers powered. The additional servers you see are ready and waiting should we need to expand for our hosted services customers. I just thought some of you may like to see how we've invested to ensure maximum reliability for our hosted customers.

As always we would welcome any comments below or contact us directly.

I look forward to posting more information on the forth coming forum update very soon :)

Instant KB.NET 2.0.6 Active Directory Module Released

Ryan Healey — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:45:39 GMT

Hey All,

I hope I find you all very well, thought I'd take the time to post and let you know that the 2.0.6 version of our Active Directory Module has been released today, which has been overhauled slightly to make use of the improvements in 2.0.6 and to resolve some issues that were present for a small percentage of users of 2.0.5 of the KB with the 2.0.4 Module.

Existing customers can download this update from your My.InstantASP account at...
http://my.instantasp.co.uk/MyLicenses.aspx

For those that were experiencing problems, the module should no longer produce an exception when administrating users, and you should find that the module now functions in all 3 skins provided with InstantKB.NET. You should also find that the module function's slightly faster than it's previous iteration. A SQL script is no longer required to be run on installation, making getting up and running with the AD module that little bit quicker.

No new functionality has made it into this release, however we're looking at incorporating functionality in the future for such things as: Multiple Domains/Active Directory servers per KB, multiple group pairings, allowing control of KB permissions/roles/groups to be managed from your active directory console, and improved features for seamless integrated active directory login. Although which of these will make it to prime-time remains to be seen in future.

Also, as a bit of a heads-up to our blog readers, we're currently in the process of making some additions to our My.InstantASP customer service area. Some of you may have noticed a much faster response from our ticketing support, this is due to a new streamlined method for ticket processing, allowing us to get to your queries quicker than previously, and get through more queries within any given time period.

We're also adding additional functionality for our newer 'Hosted Services' Customers, who receive a premium support service as part of their hosted solution. Additional information on hosted services for those interested, can be found here:http://www.instantasp.co.uk/Services/

You can now follow us on Twitter :)

Ryan Healey — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 23:26:25 GMT

We've taken the plunge and created our very own twitter account. You can follow us on twitter @...

http://twitter.com/instantASP

Alongside the usual product updates & announcements we'll be attempting to keep things interesting with links to other sites & short daily updates to let you all know what we are working on.

If you use twitter please follow us and / or send us a mention we would love to hear from you.

We look forward to seeing you on twitter :)

P.S Stay tuned for some exciting news with regard to twitter support within InstantForum.NET asap :)

InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 Released

Ryan Healey — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:36:45 GMT

Hi All,

Hope everyone is well.

Just following up from my previous post. I'm delighted to announce InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 was released yesterday.

Existing customers can access the update via our My.InstantASP client area at http://my.instantasp.co.uk/MyLicenses.aspx

You can find further information with regard to changes & how to updating within our knowledgebase at...

http://kb.instantasp.co.uk/Documentation/Upgrading-from-InstantKB.NET-2.0.5-to-2.0.6

If you have any questions with regard to updating from a previous version of InstantKB.NET please don't hesitate to open a support ticket or email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk. You can of course also pop a comment below or within the knowledgebase article above however i can't guarantee we will get to this as quickly as email & tickets.

Thank you as always to all our customers who worked with us during this update. You know who you are :)

We hope you enjoy this update and i look forward to posting further news ASAP,

InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 Update (available Monday)

Ryan Healey — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 16:28:32 GMT

I just wanted to let you know you can expect InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 to be available for download on Monday.

The primary purpose of this release is to resolve a handful of rendering issues specific to Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) when editing & adding articles within the Staff Control Panel. If your having any problems with IE8 when working with your content we would suggest you apply the 2.0.6 update. You'll also notice a number of nice improvements to the WYSIWYG editor in 2.0.6 when adding & editing content.

We also wanted to take this opportunity (before InstantKB.NET 2.1) to bring InstantKB.NET more in-line with our forthcoming InstantForum.NET 4.2 update and as such you'll notice two key changes :-

1. The default "Classic" skin has been updated.

The classic skin now supports rounded corners for the various "InstantASP.Common.Ui.WebControls.PanelBar" controls that appear throughout our products. You'll also notice both the HTML & CSS has been optimized further. We've made several improvements to the CSS class names to make these more compact & reduce overall markup.

With the release of InstantForum.NET 4.2 the CSS files will be interchangeable, meaning you can skin InstantForum.NET and copy the CSS & images directly over to InstantKB.NET for a easy consistent look & feel between the two products.

2. The Visual Studio.NET solution has been updated to 2008 by default

The Visual Studio.NET solution has been updated to Visua Studio.NET 2008 by default and you won't be able to open the 2.0.6 solution file in Visual Studio.NET 2005. InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 will of course still work with either the .NET 2.0 or 3.5 frameworks so this should not affect production installations.

Our forthcoming InstantForum.NET 4.2 update requires at minimum the .NET 3.5 SP1 framework. This is because we use some of the AJAX features that where introduced with .NET 3.5 SP1 update (things like JSON serialization & the history control). These are not supported in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. Extensions

We want to start using these features within InstantKB.NET and as such as of InstantKB.NET 2.1 we will be moving to .NET 3.5.

For example a common problem we see which could easily be resolved. If you perform a search within InstantKB.NET currently and then click one of the results. After reading the article if you use your browsers back button to return to your search results you'll notice they are not displayed. You have to perform a search again. To workaround this i personally open results in a new tab but this is far from ideal. This is because we use AJAX to render the search results and the page is never posted back.

To resolve this we can easily implement the history control however this is only available in .NET 3.5 SP1. Yes we could implement our own control to manage this however we are working towards standardizing the techniques we use within our code so they are familiar to other developers. Also .NET 4.0 is around the corner so moving to .NET 3.5 SP1 with the InstantKB.NET 2.1 update should work well. We would of course welcome any comments on this below.

For now as this is only a small update we took the decision to ensure InstantKB.NET will continue to work on .NET 2.0 & 3.5. I expect this will be last minor update before InstantKB.NET 2.1 so hopefully this information will offer time to prepare.

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

You can expect InstantKB.NET 2.0.6 to work great in IE7 & 8. FireFox 3.x, Chromme, Opera 9 & Safari (both PC & mac).

You can see 2.0.6 in action within our own knowledgebase at http://kb.instantasp.co.uk/ & within our online demos at http://www.instantasp.co.uk/Products/Demos/

I look forward to posting further information on Monday. I'd certainly welcome any questions or comments in the meantime. You can post your comments below or email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

Thank you all as always for your support :)

The new InstantForum.NET 4.2 WYSIWYG Editor

Ryan Healey — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:52:20 GMT

Hope your all well. I just wanted to keep you all updated with regard to our forthcoming InstantForum.NET 4.2 update.

It's been clear from feedback recently that there a re a number of issues with the current InstantForum.NET 4.1.4 WYSIWYG editor. The current WYSIWYG editor provides only limited support for FireFox & other Mozilla based browsers & we are aware of a couple of issues with the recent IE8 update.

We wanted to quickly address these issues and several weeks back we started working on a new WYSIWYG editor for InstantForum.NET 4.2. We opted to develop our own editor to ensure we had complete control over the mark-up & to allow us to address any future issues or feature requests.

I'm pleased to say this is very near complete now and i wanted to post a few screen grabs to highlight some of the changes. You can also play with the new editor within our online 4.2 preview at http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantForum42/

Add EmotIcons

We have now moved to the EmotIcons to a menu button. This removes the need for a modal pop-up to browse all emoticons and makes it much easier to add emots You can also easily extend the list of available EmotIcons by modifying the EmotIcons.xml file provided with each InstantForum.NET skin.

Font Options

We've made some improvement here to show a preview of the font, size & heading style.

Insert Image

Again we've removed the need for a pop-up window to insert and image and moved this to a menu option. This allows you todo everything from the one page and also ensures the options are not blocked by any pop-up blockers. You can link to images or upload images from your local harddrive.

Color Picker

The color picker is now available in all editors. No need to enter hex values manually in Mozilla browsers any longer. The list of default colors can easily be modified & it's very easy to add or remove colors from this list. We will be making further improvements in future versions to extend these option further.

Add Attachments

You can now add attachments directly within the editor. Current attachments will appear below your message within the editor. Again we have moved away from a modal pop-up dialog for attachments to improve response times & ensure no issues with pop-up blockers.

Spell Checker

As you would expect the editor is provides complete spell checking support.

Add YouTube Videos

We've now made it easier to add YouTube videos to posts within InstantForum.NET 4.2.

Add IF Code

You can now use IFCode directly from the menu. As the editor now supports all major browsers the need for IF Code is reduced however it it still helpful if you wish to define custom code blocks or quick tags for adding 3rd party content. We've made improvements on how IF Code is added via a menu option now and removed the modal pop-up.

Resizable Editor

You can easily resize the height of the editor by simply dragging the bar highlighted below. This allows you to expand the height of the editor depending on your message size.

You can enable the ability to edit the HTML of message via permission sets.

We are working to make a public beta download available and currently we are aiming to have something for download late August possibly early September. You can be assured we'll be working to make something available ASAP however we do also want to ensure the first public beta is robust enough for customers to implement.

As always i'll continue to keep this blog updated with developments. In the meantime please don't forget to check out the new editor within our online demo at http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantForum42/ - whilst it;s not 100% complete it will hopefully wet your appetite for 4.2. I would of course welcome any feedback on ryan@instantasp.co.uk or via a comment here.

I look forward to posting further updates :)

InstantForum.NET 4.2 Development Preview

Ryan Healey — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:01:57 GMT

Hope your all well. As many of you are aware we've been working away on the next InstantForum.NET update v4.2. I'm delighted today to have a development preview online which will hopefully provide an early feel for what you can expect with the forthcoming 4.2 update. You can access the preview at the link below...

http://demos.instantasp.co.uk/InstantForum42/

NOTE: This is a early development preview. We still have features to implement and further performance tuning to undertake. This preview is provided to show you how things are progressing and does not represent the final quality you can expect with the 4.2 update.

Within the current preview you'll see some of the work we've done to AJAX enable paging & sorting within the forum. we've also made several architectural changes which may not be immediately obvious from the current demo. For example 4.2 now uses standard ASP.NET 2.0 master pages. We've moved away from our old 1.1 implementation of master pages which will ensure integration into existing ASP.NET sites is much easier.

For those with a keen eye you may also notice that most panels are now loaded dynamically. Meaning the majority of the user interface is built up on the client (as you would expect from a true AJAX implementation) using JavaScript & JSON. This greatly reduces the HTML sent to the client resulting in much smaller pages, more responsive load times & reduced load on the server. Early benchmarks show 4.3 can already serve many more requests per second than 4.1.4 on comparable hardware. Paging & sorting works via a web service which returns JSON data for best performance.

The AJAX functionality works well and is certainly a nice performance improvement however we will also continue to offer a liehgt weight skin which is not dependent on client-side script and will work on a number of devices.

Key Improvements & additions

Please remember we are still working on 4.2 and as such some of these items don't appear within our current early development preview.

General Features

AJAX / JSON based UI
Strict W3C XHTML compliant mark-up & CSS based layout
Improved search & search API (making it possible to subscribe, consume or link to results matching specific criteria)
Web Services layer for all key objects (JSON & XML supported with examples of how to consume this from your existing web site)
Improved RSS support (several new feeds will be available and it will be possible to create your own feeds from search results)
Post Tags (Similar to InstantKB.NET users can tag posts & navigate via a tag cloud)
Improvements to how settings & permission data is stored. This will allow us to add new setting groups or permission set options without having to touch the database.
Now uses standard ASP.NET master page
Shared login & roles with InstantKB.NET (if installed)
Quick Reply option when replying to posts
Optimized markup & CSS
Support for additional 3rd party WYSIWYG / RichText editors
Lots of code refactoring & performance improvements

We are also working on an extensibility option for InstantForum.NET and will be providing some basic bespoke modules you can plug-in to 4.2 with the final release. The idea here is to demonstrate how you can add new modules or panels to InstantForum.NET & even custom code. Our long-term gold is to hopefully encourage some community developed add-ons.

Browser Support

4.2 will support IE7 & 9, FF 3, Safari (both PC & Mac) & Opera 9.
We are also hoping to provide support for Chrome.

Admin Features

We'll be providing improved tools to more easily ban members & remove spam or abusive posts
A new settings page will be available to prune & archive older posts, private message, users & attachments

InstantForum.NET 4.2 will be provided as a Visual Studio.NET 2008 solution and will require .NET framework 2.0 or above..
We've made breaking changes to API calls to select strongly typed collections of data. We will be providing full documentation on these changes.

I intend to post further blog entries over the coming days & weeks detailing various topics around 4.2. For now i would certainly welcome any feedback based on the early development preview linked above. You can pop your comments below or email me directly on ryan@instantasp.co.uk

We will be working hard to make a early BETA download available for existing InstantForum.NET customers. I'll be posting further information once available.

We appreciate it's been a while since the last InstantForum.NET update and whilst we are tempted to add a number of new features we'll be holding back with this release in an effort to bring you the final release as soon as possible.

This update will bring the product right up to date in terms of the latest versions of Visual Studio.NET & .NET framework and will address the most common customer issues & requests. We'll be pushing forward with new features in forthcoming releases and you can certainly expect these more often.

We don't have a solid date for the final release currently. We'll be focused on complete the features above ASAP and i'll keep this blog updated with our progress. I'll be posting a firm release date as we near the first public beta. I look forward to any comments and posting further updates very soon :)

Improvements at InstantASP

James Trott — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:13:41 GMT

Some of you may have noticed the recent launch of our Hosted Services, on the back of this, several improvements have been made, with more in the pipeline here at InstantASP, so I thought I'd take some time out of my schedule to run through what those are, and what they might mean to you the InstantASP customer.

1) Hosting Improvements; the launch of our hosted services also signals an enhancement in our hosting, both of our back-end systems, such as our website, order/delivery system, My.InstantASP and support ticketing, and our licensing server, but also an enhancement in the provision for all of our Hosted Services/Software customers. Higher speed links, full system redundancy, and enhanced hardware, now means that our provision, and the applications of our hosted services customers, run lightning fast, and with as close to 100% uptime as we could hope to provide*

2) Improvements to My.InstantASP; we're currently undertaking to incrementally upgrade areas of our My.InstantASP site, in order to streamline customer service, and enhance our support provision whilst reducing response times.

All this as well as adding new functionality for our Hosted Services users to better manage their hosting, even multiple hosting accounts, all from the one My.InstantASP account. You'll notice these changes slowly creeping into My.InstantASP over the next few weeks as they're released and we hope you find them a significant improvement.

These improvements are based almost entirely on direct customer feedback, and we'd love to know any more suggestions or comments you have on changes, present or future!

*excluding maintenance periods.

Problems searching PDFs with InstantKB.NET?

Ryan Healey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 13:03:30 GMT

A InstantKB.NET customer reported to us yesterday he was having problems with PDFs not appearing within search results when expected. We ran over the obvious points to ensure the attachments are saved to the database & the InstantKB_Attachments.AttachmentBlob column had a full-text index.

After running through the obvious i was curious what could be preventing these PDFs from being searched.After an hour or two of investigation it appears the Adobe PDF v6 iFilter which we suggest within our knowledgebase article (Setting up full text search within InstantKB.NET) does not support some newer PDFs. For example PDFs with table of contents.

This prompted me to look for an update to the free Adobe iFilter however the only stand-alone download i could find was the Adobe v9 iFilter for 64-bit. This is great if your running a 64-bit database server however many of our customer didn't have this option.

After a little further investigation t appears you can use the latest free Adobe PDF iFilter v9 on 32-bit however for some reason the 32-bit ifilter is not provided as a stand-alone download and require you to install the full version of Adobe Reader 9.

This is certainly not ideal to have to install the full version of Acrobat (is it still called that) on your database server however we found we got much better results with the v9 iFilter and if PDF search is critical to your InstantKB.NET installation you may wish to consider using the v9 iFilter.

In light of this information we've updated our knowledgebase article to provide further instructions on how to install both the 32 & 64 bit v9 iFilter...

http://kb.instantasp.co.uk/Documentation/Setting-up-full-text-search-within-InstantKB.NET

I hope this helps someone :)

Welcome to the InstantASP Blog

Ryan Healey — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 01:34:25 GMT

Hello and welcome to the InstantASP Blog. We are delighted to finally have a blog online to keep you all updated. If you want to stay up-to date without having to check back here please subscribe to our RSS below.

Whilst we always post release news & general updates within our community forums we wanted a way to keep you all updated during our development cycles and a mechanism to engage with users to gather early feedback during the development of new features & ideas..

Our InstantKB.NET customers may recognize this blog. We've tweaked the "Bloggish" skin provided with InstantKB.NET 2.0.5 to provide some basic blog functionality. An improved version of this skin will be available with the InstantKB.NET 2.1 update. You can expect to see blog posts on this in the near future.

Our first goal with this blog will be to keep you all updated on the status of our forthcoming InstantForum.NET 4.2 update. Whilst this is only a point release there are a number of major changes and we'll be posting information on these changes & features to address questions & any feedback during development. .

http://blog.instantasp.co.uk/LatestRss/
http://blog.instantasp.co.uk/Tags/InstantForum.NET
http://blog.instantasp.co.uk/Tags/InstantKB.NET

Alongside product updates we are also hoping this blog will provide the opportunity for us to post links, tips & tricks and general information our customers may find useful. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to post your comment below or contact us.

We look forward to keeping you all updated :)