Migrating from Community Server to AspNetForum

Chris Hynes from Krystalwire has wrote a great article on how to migrate from Community Server to Jitbit Asp-Net Forum. Thanks Chris!

New versions

We've recently released updates for some of our products, here are the details:

Jitbit ASP.NET Forum 4.7.0. - this version has finally fixed the Security Exception, which was thrown when the forum was run in a partially trusted environment AND SEO-friendly URLs module is enabled. This has been fixed. Also, the 4.7 allows reordering forums in the list (we've added a custom "OrderByNumber" column to the database, which can be edited in the admin panel).

Network Switcher 5.42 improves the IE proxy switcher and overall performance.

RSS Feed Creator 3.46 also features improved performance and usability (processing keyboard shortcuts), and generates cleaner XML code.

Jitbit AspNetForum just got better

As you might know, SQL Server Express 2005 has a great feature: it can automatically attach an .MDF file to a running instance of SQL Server Express when an application first establishes a connection. So if you run SQL Server Express - you simply place the database file to some location, modify the database connection string to something like "AttachDbFileName=c:\database.MDF" and you are ready to run.

Another great feature is the ASP.NET "App_Data" folder. If you are familiar with ASP.NET, you know that this special folder holds databases (.mdb and .mdf files), XML files, and other data stored in files. And the user account that is used to run the forum application (for example, the local ASPNET account) already has permissions to read, write, and create files in this folder by default.

Now I can't imagine how stupid we were - we never utilized these two great features before!

So please welcome Asp-Net-Forum 4.4.1.
1) The installation package now comes with a ready-to-use SQL Server Express 2005 database file (MDF-file).
2) Both MS Access sample database and SQL Express sample database files are now located in the "App_Data" folder.

Now, if you want to use the forum under MS Access or SQL Express, forget about dealing with file permissions, and, moreover, forget about editing the connection string! The installation just got easier - simply copy the forum to your website and start working in seconds.

Multilingual HelpDesk and AspNetForum - get a discount!

Just a quick note on what we're working on and a discount opportunity we offer.

For the last two weeks we are being focused on globalizing our ASP.NET-based software products. Our Help-Desk Software user interface has been completely reworked, and all language-specific elements are now configured as assembly resources... Don't mind this technical stuff. The point is, that the application is now easily localizable to other languages. The latest version of HelpDesk comes with English and German languages included, and we plan adding more languages in the future.

Our Asp-Net-Forum software is also being localized now. The first languages to support will be English and Dutch. Also, unlike HelpDesk, which is translated in full, AspNetForum will be translated partially (admin-area will remain in English, but all the topic pages, message-lists, search etc. will be translated). UPDATE: AspNetForum is also translated in full!

Help us with a translation and get a discount! We offer a huge (up to 50%) discount to anyone who will help us with the translation into one of the popular languages. Please contact us!

Routine

It's been a while since my last post, but I guess it's OK considering how busy we have been this week.

Our Macro Recorder software has been featured at GiveAwayOfTheDay for 24 hours. People have made some quite reasonable comments, so we had a lot of ideas how to improve our Macro Recorder. We are already working on a new version which will fix the context-menu positioning, add some new macro commands and more.

We have also released fresh versions of Jitbit ASP.NET Forum, which fixes some critical errors under MySQL, and System Purifier which improves its performance.

AspNetForum: future plans

Just a short note to let you know we're working on the next version of our ASP.NET forum software which will bring:

• "closing a thread" feature to make it readonly
• cleaner source codes and a bit of optmizations
• users list will show most active forum users, most recent forum users etc.
• logging "last visit" for all users

And many more. Stay updated.