Open Source .NET Forum Software? | Tech Off

JohnnyAwesome
Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?

Just a quick question for anyone who knows:

I just received a request this morning to drop in a "forum" utility into an existing internal ASP.NET 2.0 app we have. I usually like to roll most things myself, but in this case it is not going to be public facing, heavily used, or really that important.

I am familiar with DasBlog, Haack's Subtext project, and some other .Net blogging software downloads that are out there but are there any Forum types (with threads and responses out of the box) that anyone is familiar with or that they would suggest? Hopefully that are open source so I can manipulate the authentication to operate with AD and maybe utilize an existing table structure as well?

(This isn't a "lazy web" request. I started researching but before I just start downloading and playing with and tossing out different alternatives I was hoping someone had used something I could start to review first instead of just blindly arriving at it. Thank you!)

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

YAF is good, but I don't know how well it integrates with existing applications (if you can swap in a new auth class, for example).

Do any "real" ASP.NET forum softwares make effective use of ASP.NET's "Profile" state and Membership features?

JohnnyAwesome
Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?

W3bbo wrote:

Do any "real" ASP.NET forum softwares make effective use of ASP.NET's "Profile" state and Membership features?

Thank you good app to check out.

No. Most open source projects do not take advantage of Membership features in 2.0 but some that are moderately priced claim to. I have not filled out the forms to evaluate those yet, but I might end up going that route.

Larsenal
ready to give an answer

Please do share your findings with the group.

JohnnyAwesome
Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?

Larsenal wrote:

Please do share your findings with the group.

Of course!

TommyCarlier
Trust me, I'm from the Internets

Doesn't C9v4 use ASP.NET's Profile and Membership features? And like W3bbo I'd also have to recommend YAF.

yman

W3bbo wrote:

but I don't know how well it integrates with existing applications (if you can swap in a new auth class, for example).

Authentication in Yaf is pluggable and the forum is designed to handle the creation of a user profile if it encounters a foreign username returned from the auth provider.

Sven Groot
You can't have everything; after all, where would you put it?

W3bbo wrote:

YAF is good, but I don't know how well it integrates with existing applications (if you can swap in a new auth class, for example).

I'm surprised to hear you say that, considering their HTML isn't even close to validating (it doesn't even have a doctype).

EDIT: I do agree YAF is good, I'm just surprised W3bbo thinks so.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Sven Groot wrote:

I'm surprised to hear you say that, considering their HTML isn't even close to validating (it doesn't even have a doctype).

EDIT: I do agree YAF is good, I'm just surprised W3bbo thinks so.

It's all relative.

I'd rather choose YAF, then manually edit the source so it doesn't suck, then recreate a forum software thingie.

In the end, it's all just a bunch of UserControls and maybe a small amount of hardcoded XHTML (easily changed).

JohnnyAwesome
Eggshell with Romalian type. What do you think?

Ok. So, some other items came up and I was unable to implement YAF as quickly as I would have liked, but it is plugged in and running now.

A few follow up items:

The HTML is not spectacular but the savings in development time it would take to match many of its other features more than makes up for it. So, in my case any XHTML complaints are moot, since I am not going to write that sh!t from scratch for a minor request like the type I was trying to address.

The source code compiled easy enough into a bin solution for any alterations I required including changing around the breadcrumbing to work with a control I had in place in the masterpage I made their default file inherit. Security alterations were not even difficult to change over (the app now resides in an intranet site using AD authentication) and easy to get running.

My only complaint was how rife it was in code-behind/class in-line HTML. Kind of a pain from my perspective, but I think that might be from YAF being built upon legacy 1.x code. Maybe someone who knows more about the project than I can elaborate more?

All in all, its really stable (can tell there has been a lot of work put into it) and when you look at development time as man-hours and dollars this was just a super-savings and well appreciated.