XanderLand

Rob Howard, of Telligent Systems gave a presentation last Thursday night at the Plano .Net User Group on their new project, Community Server. Community Server is the coming together of three of the premier .Net application available today…The ASP.Net Forums, .Text (a blogging engine) and NGallery, a picture gallery application. One thing that caught my eye was when he was explained how thoroughly they’ve disconnected Community Server’s form and the function. The heart of Community Server is driven by a substantial number of custom server controls…Controls that render no UI whatsoever. The UI is a generated by user controls that are injected in at runtime as a skin. It makes for an extraordinarily flexible system, and I think that I’m going to try to do something along those lines in my implementation of IssueTracker.

No, it doesn’t need it. IssueTracker is fine the way that it is. Why do I want to put the effort into this sort of enhancement, then? Primarily because it’d be fun to do, but it would, at least in a theoretical sense, also have a practical application. Bug tracking packages are used day in and day out, and a good design can make or break them. At the last company I worked for, that was the main reason that we abandoned Bugzilla in favor of a commercial app. Bugzilla did everything that we wanted (more than the app that we purchased to replace it) but it just looked bad, and it was a pain to use. We actually used the Red Hat build, which is substantially more pleasing to the eye than the standard build, but it wasn’t good enough, and it was simply too hard to do anything to it other than minor tweaks. With a UI that’s as dynamic as the UI that’s shipping with Community Server, it would be child’s play to update and modify until it suits the users that it’s been installed for. A single installation could even be skinned significantly differently for individual users. That’s some seriously awesome power for an application that’s all about productivity.