I am new to portals and relatively new to ASP.NET and I would appreciate some clarification about IBS and the Portal Starter Kit.

I have read existing postings and come away with the impression that the Portal Starter Kit is a more updated version of IBS, which is not being further developed.

But then I notice a lot of developer activity on the forums for both IBS and Portal Starter Kit and Microsoft features both prominently and independently on the ASP.NET site.

I have been leaning toward IBS because I have the Wrox book Building an ASP.NET Intranet to guide my initial work in adding new modules, which I know I need to do for my purposes.

I can't at the moment download a VB version of IBS because of ongoing work to address the security issue. So it IS being further developed! But the issue is addressed for the Portal Starter Kit which is available for download.

I am confused and would like to begin my portal work with the best current choice. I realize that there are other related non-Microsoft portals (e.g., dotnetnuke) but I want to start with the best MS choice and then consider others when I have a better understanding for making such a choice.

Any guidance to compare/contrast current status, active developer community, and future development plans for IBS and the Portal Starter Kit would be greatly appreciated.

I would also appreciate a time estimate (rough timeframe, not a promise) for release of the new VB download for IBS with the security fix completed.

Well, the security bug has been fixed so it is ok now. Just a suggestion, check out DotNetNuke, it is in VB.NET and is based on the IBS.

I saw that the security bug is fixed for the VB.NET version of IBuySpy, which is great.

That still leaves a question about how a new developer is supposed to choose between IBuySpy Portal vs. Portal Starter Kit.

I leave the issue of non-MS portals such as DotNetNuke out of the picture for the moment and focus on what MS presents on its own ASP.NET site.

Regarding IBuySpy Portal vs. Portal Starter Kit,

What's the difference?
What's the point of maintaining both in parallel as MS starting points and forum communities?
How do new and longtime developers choose which community to participate in for reviewing posts and contributing ideas?
Is there a clearcut recommendation of one over the other?

What's the difference ... The starter kit uses XML for much opf its configuration storage

How do new and longtime developers choose which community to participate in for reviewing posts and contributing ideas ... I made a decision to stay with the older version because it uses SQL Server, I had it deployed, many of the commercial modules use this version and are not compatible with the new starter kit

Is there a clearcut recommendation of one over the other ... see above for my POV

DavidM

Hi, David,
thanks for your introduction.
Can you clarify what is POV?
Have I understood correctly that modules depend on the way (in SQL server or XML files) of storing configurations? Or there are more dependencies (like dependency on the site structure, what else)?