Development

Upcoming Project Changes

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 01:45:00 GMT

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.

BugNET 0.9 CTP 1

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:44:08 GMT

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 changes
Feeds have been re-written to support both ATOM and RSS feeds.
New menu

The current CTP build 13 can be found in this forum post.

Note: Please do not use this version in a production environment as it is an early release and it will not support upgrades to the final version.

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The Return of My Issues

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 14:28:00 GMT

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
- Sorting and Paging
- RSS support

As for the timeline of the release we hope to get this out before the end of December as a holiday present to everyone which will include the my issues feature along with some bug fixes from 0.8.270.0.

Thank you to everyone for their support and feedback.

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0.7 Final Release Candidate 1

Wed, 06 May 2009 08:00:00 GMT

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 is set to the latest for that project.
All notification subscriptions are deleted for users that do not exist.

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Microsoft Web Platform Installer

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:00:00 GMT

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.

Bulk Issue Editing in Version 0.8

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:00:00 GMT

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.

Work continues on the 0.8 release and progress is steady, currently work is being done on the localization adding all text strings to the database. This will make it easier for users to translate to other languages through a seperate web page.

After that is complete focus will be put on subversion integration, storing an issues subversion revisions as a seperate tab on the issue detail screen and linking to a subversion repository. Some great work has been done here and it should not take long to add this into the application. I am a little hesitant to do full integration such as viewing diffs etc through BugNET since there are many nice web based subversion viewers out there but we will start small and expand later if people think it should be included.

In the next few days I will blog about how custom queries will function in 0.8, which is currently feature complete at the moment with the ability to also query custom fields and save your queries.

Stay tuned!

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A look at project administration in BugNET 0.8

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:00:00 GMT

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 for a project will ensure BugNET can handle custom issue tracking needs very easily. More to come!

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The future of 0.7 and what is to come in 0.8

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 02:01:36 GMT

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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Next Release Update

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:08:16 GMT

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.

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What's next?

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 03:32:02 GMT

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.

Time Estimation

Another lacking feature has been the ability to add a time estimate to an issue. This is now possible on the new issue screen and then can be updated on the issue details screen. Also added is the total time logged on an issue. Still to be completed will be an initial estimation so you can see how the estimate compares to the actual amount of time the issue took to complete.

Milestones

The project summary up until now has displayed the versions of the project and the count off issues for those versions. This has been confusing for most users as you often want to see issues to be completed. This has now been changed to display the "milestones" formally known as "fix for version" and the number of issues that are to be completed for that version.

Roadmap

The roadmap has also been updated to not display any milestones when all issues are closed or completed. It also now displays issues that are "unscheduled" or that are not assigned a milestone to be fixed in.

Layout Improvements

As always, layout improvements have been added to clean up the UI and add styling to give the interface a cleaner look.

Documentation

I have recently had some time to start filling in the documentation (finally , yes I know). To do this I had to fix a few bugs in the current dotnetnuke wiki module as well. I will try to fill in the documentation as best as possible over the next few release cycles.

Next Release

The next release will contain these updates and be out very soon, probably the end of this month. There will probably be one more bug fix release soon after to wrap up some outstanding bugs then the focus will move towards version 0.8 and some long awaited features such as localization and custom queries. The project roadmap has been updated in the documentation wiki.

Thank you to everyone for their continued support.

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