CS Nuggets

This blog is for addons, bugs, fixes, and issues pertaining to Community Server.

CS2008: The good news and the not so good news

Hey Everyone,

It's been quite a while since I've had much news about CS as I've been working on other projects, but that should be changing for at least the next few months, which is part of the good news.  I'm going to be working on a CS related contract and I will also be working on the CS2008 version of the calendar control in my spare time.  The not so good news is that I am seriously considering the option of not upgrading any of my CS sites to CS2008, though I do have one internal CS2008 site for development purposes.

The project that I will be working on is using CS2007 and the customer has made a firm decision to not move to CS2008.  The major reason that I and others are considering this is because upgrading to CS2008 is a major undertaking and it is also a major change from the original direction of CS.  Performance issues aside (as they can be worked out), CS 2008 doesn't feel like a full product release.  It feels more like a stepping stone to an unknown future.  The current licensing model has made it impossible for small businesses and some mid-sized businesses to afford CS, and if I upgrade this site to CS2008, I will no longer have the .NET Community license that I have with CS2007.  I would be in direct violation of the current CS2008 license.

What does this mean to you?  Well, it means that this next release of the calendar control may be the last.  The initial release may have more bugs than usual as I'll be the only tester prior to it being released, and bug fixes may take longer to find and fix.  I have a feeling that Telligent is going to add some sort of calendar functionality to CS in the not to distant future, so this may only be a short lived issue, though there will definitely need to be some sort of conversion from this control to whatever Telligent may provide.  As things progress, I'll try to keep everyone up-to-date.

My next blog post will cover how I am using TFS to manage multiple branches of CS and how it makes it easier to selectively merge SDK updates into these branches.  TFS has 2 way merging, which means that you can merge up to the root (inverted tree) or down to any branch while only affecting the 2 branches that are being merged.  Source control covers only about 25-30% of what TFS is as it is an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) application that covers builds, documentation, testing, tracking, and a lot more.

Take it easy,
Bill

Posted: Jun 23 2008, 05:39 PM by Bill Bosacker | with 2 comment(s)

Comments

Tore said:

I've been with CS since 2.x and it's sad to see old pros leaving the community. I'm just a hobbyist who didn't want drupal or some other LAMP-app which wasn't finished. Now it seems that I'll just have to be content with what Telligent serves us since most CS pros are gone.

Thanks for helping me at the forums!

# July 30, 2008 9:47 PM

Bill Bosacker said:

Hey Tore,

I'm going to be around for a while, so don't be too bummed out.  I talked with Rob Howard and Josh Legard about my concerns and they have assured me that they are addressing my concerns, some of which have already been addressed.  I promised them that I wouldn't make some of what we talked about public, but if you can hang in there for about a year, you should be pretty happy.

Right now there aren't any options for small to mid-sized businesses and hobbyists as CS no longer supports them and Graffiti doesn't have enough features.  Over the next couple of months Telligent is increasing their investment into Graffiti and around May of next year you should see all of the features that you need.

I hope this helps,
Bill

# July 30, 2008 10:42 PM
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