Beta (or RC) version of BlogEngine.NET 2.7 has been released this weekend with some cool new features like extension-less URLs and lots of small improvements and bug fixes. If you want to test drive it, head over to Codeplex site and download the latest. More...
Let's start by creating new empty ASP.NET website and adding Default.aspx with minimal “hello world” markup. When you access your site and check it with profiler, you’ll see single get request for default page. More...
Tell me what you want, but CSS is twisted. Some simple basic tasks that should be no-brainer sometimes make you throw things and say words you later deeply regret. Usually people use IE6 as lightning rod, sadly even if you don't care about IE6 anymore CSS still will find ways to hurt you. Consider this simple scenario - I want DIV with some text and 3 little ones inside it alined right. More...
Why in the world would you want to do that? Well, for one, you might want to use it in Remoting. Second possibility is when you have different objects that you want to treat the same way, and XML Document is one of them. Whatever your situation is, XML Document is not serializable as is. You'll have to provide your own implementation - create class that inherits from XMLDocument and implements ISerializable interface: More...
Did it ever happened to you? You have a problem and, after research and brainstorming, finally come up with this nice elegant solution. Two month (and hundred problems) later, you are staring at the screen with basically the same task in front of you. And trying to figure out - how the hell did you do it in the first place? Yes, I'm talking knowledge base - not an original idea and lots of people use their blogs exactly for this reason. I'm joining the crowd and will publish here code snippets under "code snippets" category. Here is the first one. More...
Code Formatter extension
For those who use BlogEngine as a technical blog (which is pretty common at this stage) code formatting feature is a must. Sure, you can squeeze your code in between “pre” tags and you are done – well, almost – editor will probably remove most of the white spaces and you’ll have to add some non-braking-spaces instead. But if you want coloring and nice formatting you’ll need more than that. There are several options to explore, and most obvious one is BlogEngine’s code formatter extension that comes with installation bits. To use extension you simply enclose your code within square-bracketed tags and specify what language you are going to format. If you do it from Tiny MCE rich box editor, it will add “p” and “pre” tags automatically for you, if you prefer doing it from HTML view you’ll have to add some tags manually, as shown in the picture on the right. Because Tiny MCE has a habit of re-formatting your HTML, based on your configuration results might vary and sometimes not be pretty. And you may not use Tiny MCE at all – if you replaced it with another editor. So you might run into problems using formatting extension, lots of people do (based on discussions in the BlogEngine's forum). No worries – there always more than one way to skin the cat! More...