We just added new Forums to 8bitrocket.com and it took 3 hours. That’s 3 hours from downloading the source, to skinning and configuring it for us. We used the open source Yet Another Forum .NET and we are very pleased.
I have been looking for a decent, easy to integrate Bulletin Board/Forums application written in ASP.NET 2.0 with C# utilizing a SQL Server back-end for a very long time. Most .NET forums applications are modules for other, larger projects (Rainbow, Nuke), are written with VB.NET, don’t have an easy SQL Server integration, or take a couple days to analyze and configure before they can be installed. Yet Another Forum .NET installed so quickly, and worked so flawlessly, that I’m still in a bit of shock about how well it all went.
To get the forums installed, I performed the following actions:
1. I downloaded the BIN version from sourceforge.net and then unzipped it onto my own machine.
2. I created a /forums directory at my web host and configured it as it’s own application in IIS
3. I FTP ed the Yet Another Forums .NET files to the /forums directory
4. I set-up my db connection string, then ran their simple install by navigating to it through my web browser
5. I edited one of the existing themes and then edited the default.aspx page to have my own design. Since the forum runs as it’s own User Control inside of a single page, this was incredibly simple.
6. I created links on the 8bitrocket.com to access the Forums.
That’s it. It all worked without a hitch. My only complaint might be that while it is ASP.NET 2.0, it does not use Master Pages, or ASP.NET 2.0 Themes, which would have made my site integration even easier.
Anyway, check out our Forums to see the results. Although your mileage may vary, if you are looking for an easy way to get easy to use Forums on your ASP.NET 2.0 hosted web site, I would seriously consider Yet Another Forum .NET.
(note: This should go without saying but we at 8bitrocket.com are on no way affiliated with Yet Another Forum .NET. We are just very happy users)