A lot of "power bloggers", prefer to use Windows Live Writer instead of built-in web editor. No matter how good web editor is, desktop publishing is just too hard to beat, at least at the moment. I personally like WLW myself and use it whenever I can. But this is not the only choice you have on the desktop; another big one is MS Word 2007. I'm not an Office guru, but if you watch the video at the end of this post you can get ideas how easy and intuitive content creation can be when you have the right tool at your disposal. You can set it up with BlogEngine just as easy as WLW. Simply open new document and go to Publish/Blog in the office menu. More...

Preparing for BE 1.4 release, which is coming soon (although exact date not yet set), I started working on documentation for Extension Manager and changes it has compared to previous BE version. This is a short list I came up with. Obviously, I'll have to go into specifics and provide code examples for documentation be useful. This will be on the Wiki as soon as 1.4 released. More...

For Windows developers trying to diversify their skills and go Mono, setting up environment is probably the most painful experience. We spoiled by Microsoft tricked us into believe that setup and configuration done by repeatedly pressing “ok” button. It is not so in the wild world outside MS sandbox. For those bold and curious, as a first step I recommend another sandbox – VMware. Try it, see if you like it and, if not – not a big deal, just remove virtual image and pretend it never happened. No hard feelings. More...

Chris Blankenship came up with an initiative to start email subscription for administrators who have BlogEngine deployed on there websites. This can be useful for anybody who wants to stay on top of any important news about BlogEngine, not just sysadmins, so I would encourage folks to sign up. This is purely community effort – which, in my opinion, is great. There is going to be a new community site in the near future, but before it materializes, I glad to see when someone stands up.

I see great potential here, BE need to push it harder to become sort of a hub for each blog instance out there, not only providing services like subscriptions by exposing set of APIs, but also letting people to interact in p2p manner, using their blogs as part of BE network. We all can benefit from this. If anyone has ideas and proposals in this direction – share your thoughts!

Widget is a special control you can add to the sidebar. What makes it special is that it is a member of the "zone" - area where you can add and configure these reusable components through the zone manager. It is similar to SharePoint WebParts - you can drag it around, set properties etc. And, in BlogEngine, you can build widget just in few simple steps. More...

For BlogEngine enthusiasts who like live dangerously and always update their sites with latest code from repository, in the latest build Extension Manager set to use generic data store layer instead of doing it's own thing as it did previously. The story behind it is that in the next release we adding Widgets and customizable Themes, and it makes sense to unify data storage for any kind of "extensions" to avoid headaches in the future. For Extension Manager, it means a bit of redesign. Most of it transparent to the users, but some requires your attention. More...

Quick follow up on enclosure support in the latest BE build. I made a slight change to make it easier to use and better play with multiple extensions – the media directory location setting has been deprecated. BE will turn your media file into enclosure no matter where you put it - as long as it is local to your server and valid (physically exists). More...

Enclosure support has been added to the latest BlogEngine.Net code base. Enclosure is a tag added to your RSS feed that let you publish podcasts on your blog. RSS readers like iTunes and others recognize this tag and let users subscribe to the media files you published. Here is how it works. More...

After giving it more thought, I decided to make some significant changes to the picture from the previous post. Main reason is that I wanted to make settings layer a thing on its own. Make it more generic and flexible. More...

You might think that BlogEngine 1.3 was released yesterday, but It actually been a while and it looks like people like it and want more. New version is under constructions and part of it, that I'm responsible for, is a new shared storage model. The basic idea here is to be able to use Extension Manager as a storage provider for any type of extensions. Today, if you look at Extension Manager from the 10 thousand feet, it looks kind of like Russian Doll: you have manager itself, it has collection of extensions, extension has collection of settings and settings have collection of parameters. More...