Just thought I'd drop a line for the faithful. It's very flattering that even months after the last release I still get emails praising the application as easy to use and set up. Mixed in with the praise is the question as to whether there will be a .NET 2.0 version.
The answer is yes! I'm plugging away at it slowly but surely. This time around you will be seeing some vast improvements over v1.1 including:
- New layout- I am going to maximize screen real estate (the sidebar menu looked nice, but ate up a good chunk of the viewable space last time around)
- Less Tables, More CSS- I'm pushing hard this time to make sure css is consistantly used throughout the site. Where it's convenient and makes sense tables will be going away and css styled divs will be going in.
- More intuitive coding pattern- The existing codebase is pretty easy to modify and use, but I think I can take it a step further!
- Performance Enhancements- This time around you'll see some more agressive caching going on which will be configurable in the web.config file.
- SQL Reporting Services Project- One of the major weaknesses of the existing release is that there wasn't much in the way of reporting mostly because I was unsure what users would need. I have gotten a lot of feedback in this area and will be releasing a sql reporting services project with a series of reports that can be deployed. I will likely include the same reports in the application, but they won't have all the nice charts, exports, etc that reporting services provides.
- Atlas! - The new version will embrace the use of Atlas where it is appropriate.
When will all this happen? I'm shooting for around September/October. Hopefully Atlas will be final by then.