All's Quiet On The Western Front
It's been awful quiet on my blogs lately, so I thought I'd take a few minutes to talk about what I've been working on this month.
Nihkil let the cat out of the bag a tad early. Yes, I am working on putting a community together specifically for server controls. It's going to be a lot more than just blogs, and most of it will run on an enhanced version of .Text. We're hoping to launch at the end of the month, but no promises. A lot of things have to be in place before we can make it live. I'll be talking about this more in a few weeks.
LonghornBlogs.com is going to be getting an upgrade soon. Along with .Text 0.96, which will allow for searching the blog system, we're going to start pulling in feeds from other Longhorn-related blogs. I've been waiting for this for a long time, and Andy starts working on the software to make it happen this evening. I have yet to decide whether or not we'll make this program available to the community, or keep it as an Interscape-community-only thing. We'll see. I'm told we'll also have the ability to have global categories, which will allow us to further expand the system in exciting ways.
Speaking of Andy, he just wrapped up development on ScrollingGrid 2.0. We're now entering a beta phase, in which I'll be testing its capabilities in a number of different apps that I have, and then sending it out to a small number of developers to test. We should be finished with the beta by the time the new site rolls out at the end of the month. The major feature of this version is that we have added some killer new client-side code that makes the columns align every time, in most browsers (IE4 - Firefox 0.8), without specificly specifying each column's width. We've also polished up the properties a bit, and made them more intuitive. Unfortunately, this will break pages for our existing customers, so I'm working on upgrading the User's Guide to walk our customers through the upgrade process. Also, this version fixes a nasty bug that broke ScrollingGrid's rendering when you tried to add paging of any kind. You can now page and scroll very effectively.
With Version 2, I really feel that ScrollingGrid accomplishes everything that I want it to. I couldn't really justify charging a whole lot before, because we were doing a lot of experimenting with our first server control release. Now, I'm really comfortable with it, and I think it will do everything that customers expect. Because of this, we're going to be adjusting ScrollingGrid's pricing model, adding new licensing levels with enhanced support options. The good news is that all existing customers will get a free upgrade to ScrollingGrid 2.0. So if you don't want to pay more for 2.0, you should head on over to our store and pick up a copy today. The next 2 weeks will be the last time that ScrollingGrid prices will be this low.
On the DeadBolt.NET front, thanks to Jamie Cansdale and his updated ManagedAddins Framework, we now have a version that works with Visual Studio .NET 2002, and we will be putting that online after it has gone through some testing, and upgrades to the User's Guide. This will be the last version in the 1.0 line, and the last version that will be free. The next version will introduce some really cool new features and services, but the basic functionality (signing an assembly) will always be free.
That's about it for me. I talk more about the problems we've been encountering on the business side in my Corporate Blog. If you're interested, check it out.