I'm thinking of upgrading my existing php old punbb forum into .NET version. Today I finally downloaded and gave it a try, so that it would feel comfortable in my production environment (Win2003R2 + IIS6 + MySQL 5.0.61).

First discrepancy found was missing "Port" parameter from installation screen and ConnectionString consequently. Quite alot of people are using MySQL not on default port, so I had to patch Install.aspx manually to fix it.

The second was quite a surprise to see that in every table the UserId field is specified as VARCHAR(200) instead of expected INT(n). For this reason, table UsersInRoles created in UTF-8 database gave an error about maximal key length exceeded (which is 333 = 1000 bytes, worst case for three-byte characters in UTF8 encoding scheme).

Is there any humanly possible reason for user identifiers to NOT be integers but VARCHARS of 200 characters? 

Thanks in advance.

I was looking for a forum and then i found punbb, what was my surprise when i saw
that there is also a .NET version as i'm a .net developer( but i was looking for a lightweight
php forum). But in the first couple of minutes when i was browsing the beta code it turns out
that the code/project is coded not by the best patterns and practices that should be used
when programing an asp.net site - in other words the code works but the site is created in a
very very bad way. It seem like the code was written by a php programmer who has study
asp.net and knows it but there are some basic and fundamental differences in php and asp.net site
building( also in the live cycle of a website) and i do not only mean code but also good practices like
making a model - view - controller for the site( not in BETA!) or to not make connection to database in pages code behind files( sic!).

So i want only to say that i want to help to develop the .net version of punbb by providing
U with my support and contribution to the project, don't get me wrong it is good idea to make a .net
version and thanks for that but when i look at the code i see things that should never be done in the way they
are.

I don't know what to say more, i think i will wait for your opinion on my thoughts and then
i will start to writing here what U need to or should change to make the project more "asp.net compliant way".

Regards Andrew.

P.S. Sorry for my English it's not my native language, also sorry that sometime i can't exactly say what i mean
due to my language knowledge limitations.

Your .net web site project version works fine. However, it won't integrate well with existing web aplication. I tried to convert, but there are still some issues.

Are you guys interested in coverting it to WAP? I can give you what I have done. (I am too busy to continue.)

I download a .net version PunBB, however, when I tried to run it using vs.studio 2008, I had a compile error:

Error    96    The type or namespace name 'ProfileCommon' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)   

Any ideas?

Thanks a lot.

I will suggest that most people looking for .net based forums are likely to be developers or at least semi-developers.  As well, there may be hosting sites that will install forums for their clients.  And equally likely, developers will want to do some customization and integrate the forums into their existing web site that may or may not already have users, roles, etc.

So why not write these forums from that perspective.   It would be something more or less unique in the opensource and commercial market place  as well and as a great way to promote the PunBB  "The Integratable Forum" (is integratable even a word? ).  Doing it would take more attention to architecture, but shouldn't be a major design contraint (well maybe ).

I've done integration with YAF.  It is possible but it is hard to learn and hard to customize.   I won't say anything bad about YAF because it was never written from the perspective (although partially) of being used as anything more than stand alone forums (IMHO).  As such, their code base is very specifically organized around the needs of 'however they wanted to organize their forums' making it complex to learn and equally complex to modify.

I would suggest something like the following:

Put PunBB in its own directory, in both the app_code and the aspx pages.  It only needs to be done once and would save other developers a ton of time.

Make the profile, role providers, etc, so they can be inherited by an existing site's providers and still work. (YAF does this with the profile provider).    For example if the profile inherets from profilebase, an existing project can inheret from the  PunBB profile provider thereby adding to the existing site's custom provider without breaking anything.

Separate the asp.net roles from the PunBB security roles, so that any role can be assigned a security level in PunBB.  For example, I could assign "administrator" in  PunBB to any role from asp.net that I choose.

Use a Business Logic Layer / MVC type of architecture.  If I want to customize functionality (or hide functionality), I should be able to write my own UI, and make calls to the PunBB  BLL objects.   From this same perspective.. try to keep the UI separated from the business logic.

Be able to  turn on/off the site login, with the ability to (in webconfig?) specify a redirection URL for login.  This would allow an existing site  to make use of its own login/logout functionality.

Allow the forum to be a big 'user control' for embedding in a master page.  Something so that it doesn't look/feel like "okay you are now in a totally separate program".

Okay.. I'll stop at this point .  I don't want to waste a lot of time presenting this idea if no one is interested.  If there is interest I'll try to put together some more solid ideas.

Can you assist me with the error found here?

http://www.electricalnotes.com/Install.aspx

I'm told I need to reset my trust levels through the application files...

Where do I do this, How do I do this, what do I put in?

I hope someone can help me...

I'm using the PunBB.NET application found on Codeplex.com

Is it possible to publish PunBB as a subfolder of a main application?
My provider doesn't allow me to configure more than one web application and I would like that PunBB is located in a subfolder.

I know that I have to integrate my web.config with PunBB web.config but I don't know the exact procedure.

Have I move any other folder?

Is there some tricks to make this deploy simple?

Thanks.

I want to add PunBB.net to an existing website, which uses the asp.net membership provider as a login system. Is there a posibiltiy to bet PunBB.net to share the same membership system?