BugNET

Lately there has been a lot of buzz in the .NET / Microsoft development world with the announcements at the BUILD conference.  It is a fun time to be a .NET developer with the new changes and tools becoming available.  For BugNET, we have a few exciting announcements that we hope everyone will enjoy as well.

In order to receive community feedback regarding the next major version of BugNET we have released preview build 13.  This build will allow existing 0.8 versions to be upgraded or new installs.   Below are some of the changes in the 0.9 version of BugNET:

Improved validation throughout the application Added confirmation messages when saving and editing data Improved application configuration UI Started implementing logical deletion of properties (categories is complete so far) Complete re-work of the localization to resx files. Removed most of the hardcoded text in the application to the resx files Re-write of the mailboxreader , improved error handling, logging and attachment support. Moved from extjs framework to jquery for the display of categories New issue data pager control New issue grid layout that will not expand the page when too many columns are on the screen. Issue list is now able to be sorted by multiple columns. Issue tab counters now update properly after...

When we moved to the 0.8 release, the my issues screen was dropped in favour of custom queries.  Since then we have found out although queries provide a wealth of flexibility users rely heavily on the my issues feature in 0.7 to see at a glance an overview of issues related to their work across projects and what they have to do next.  

I am happy to announce the return of the My Issues screen for the next release with the following features:

Cross project list of issues that can be filtered by Assigned, Owned, Closed, Monitored (subscribed to notifications) Ability to exclude and show closed items via a checkbox Statistics regarding overall issue counts related to you Features found in all other issue lists Export to excel Select columns...

0.7 Final RC 1 has been released for testing.    This release is only meant to test final changes to the upgrade scripts and handles orphaned records from previous versions.  Please test this upgrade if you can and report your findings in the forums.  Please do not test this in a live installation where you have not backed up your database first. 

BugNET-0.7.936-Install.zip

Upgrade Notes:

Upgrade will delete all issues for projects that have been deleted. If a milestone doesn't exist milestone is set to the latest milestone for that project. If fixed in version doesn't exist , the fixed in version is set to null. All user tagged records that no longer exist will be set to the admin user. (edit the latest db script to change this value to another user) If category has been deleted the category...

If you are looking to get started developing with BugNET, or any other .NET web application, Microsoft has released a tool to install IIS, Visual Web Developer 2008 and SQL Server 2008. This should help users get started coding much easier than before.

One of the many requested features is bulk issue editing.  In 0.8 this is now possible through the new issue list page shown below.  After selecting the issues you would like to edit with the checkbox next to the issue you can select the edit properties button.  You will then be shown a panel of the issue properties that you can set.   Set the properties you wish to change and select save and your issues will be updated!



The second addition to the issue list is the ability to select individual columns to display in the issue list.  This is stored per user in a cookie so when you come back to the application it will remember the selected columns and can be changed anytime.



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In BugNET 0.8 the project creation / administration has been vastly improved so that you may define many of the previously hardcoded values. Most notably these hard corded values were the status, resolutions, issue types and priorities.  Although these values may work perfectly for some, it is not viable for all projects or issue tracking methods to be forced to use these.

With the new project administration functionality, you are now able to define virtually all values in the drop down lists.   Below we can see the edit project screen where we are editing our Test Project and have chosen to edit the statuses for this project.  In addition to adding, editing and deleting values you can choose an image for the value which will display on the issues list grid and are able to specify in which order they appear in the drop down list. 

 

Adding the flexibility to define custom values...

BugNET 0.7 is now entering a maintainence mode, which means that only bug fixes will be in subsequent 0.7 releases. All new features will be tackled in the upcoming 0.8 release which is well underway.

On the development front the solution will be upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 but will remain at version 2.0 of the .NET framework until the further adoption of 3.5 by online web hosts.  I am hoping to get a preview version of 0.8 out sometime this month, which means I will not be focusing on upgrades from  0.7 to this new version until a later point.

Some features that are to come / already complete:

Parent / Child Issues Redesigned add / edit issue page which now displays custom fields Custom Queries(including custom fields) that can be saved Ability to add custom priorities / status's / types etc. The start of UI localization Improvement of themes  

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Some people may have noticed that the issue tracker at support.bugnetproject.com was upgraded to version 0.7.881 that has not yet  been released to the public. 

The next release is a bug fix release but there are a few more issues to complete that will delay this release for a short while.  This combined with the recent Canadian thanksgiving holiday and myself getting ready for a vacation to Scotland has left me with no time to work on the remaining issues.

Expect the new release to be out at the end of the month or shortly into November after my vacation.

 

It has been quite a while since I have given any updates but the project has not been idle. Before we begin, just a quick note that the site may be down tomorrow August 16th, 2007 8pm EST for 3-4 hours due to my hosting provider having an outage. There are many issues, new features and improvements to address and it seems new ones are reported almost daily.  Over the last past while I have found time to complete some of these issues but also add some great improvements to the BugNET application. Categories One of the improvements I am sure is most welcome is categories can now be renamed from the administration area.  In addition to this I have spent some time implementing the great extjs ajax framework to add a treeview that allows you to drag and drop nodes to different parent categories.  Categories in both the administration area and the project summary are also now sorted alphabetically.

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