05/21/2004 22:19:14

You heard it here first ladies and gentlemen. Over the last week I've been putting the blood, sweat and tears into a new version of the Presentation Engine. There is however something a bit different about this release.... Presentation Engine has gone the route of ASP.NET. Version 3.0 will be the last version of the application written using the classic ASP/Vbscript platform. From this point forward the Presentation Engine will be on the cutting edge of web application technology - that I can say for a fact.

As some of you are aware - a change of this magnitude meant that the majority of the code in the application had to be rewritten from scratch. This means that there will be fresh bugs and little features missing here and there so I intend to run the new version on this site for a few weeks before I officially "release" the code. Due to the way in which ASP.NET works - the administration interfaces have changed quite severely. Most of the changes are nothing more than improvements due to the increased ease of building dynamic interfaces using Visual Studio 2003.

This doesn't mean you won't be able to get your hands on the code though. I will host an archive of the beta code for those of you interested in obtaining it. Things are still a bit rough right now - but I'm quite close to making the new version of the application feature complete with the current version. I only have to recode the uploader interface as things stand now. I just finished rewriting the forum portion of the application a few minutes ago.

There are some changes to this version which necessitate the version number change though I'm afraid. A few database fields have been changed due to issues with some of the field names I previously used. I've also found that the MD5 encryption routine I've been using is a bit flawed and therefore incompatible with ASP.NET's built in MD5 encryption module. This means that forum user passwords and any admin/god/article passwords will have to be reset in the transition to this new version.

As things stand now - I plan to simply delete the contents of my forum and start over. It's not a very popular feature of the site (It hasn't been added to in nearly 6 months) and I don't honestly think anybody will mind. I would rather not leave a bunch of user accounts open to the public with blank passwords set.

As I get closer to uploading the new version of the Presentation Engine for testing - I will let you guys know what is going on. I'm expecting some hefty bug-squashing sessions after I put this thing online for public consumption - so please bear with me through the process.

Thanks for your support.