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...

We all know about magic App_Code folder. Just drop class file in there and it will become a part of the web application. This is fine for scripts like PHP or "classic" ASP (VB script), but C# is strongly typed compiled language. How App_Code works? As any magic, mostly smoke and mirrors. Behind the scene, ASP.NET will create App_Code.dll and merge it with main application assembly at run time. This simple trick gives us best of both worlds - dynamism of scripting languages (ok, to the point) and all the good stuff coming with strong typing and compilation (whatever they are). 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...

Small little tiny but mostly good things. More...

I use thumb flash drives quite a lot moving between computers. It is still much faster to load a gig or two from the flash drive than to use Skydrive or other "cloud" alternative. For the most part it is painless - stick it in and OS will find and mount it, no setup requires. But one day perfectly good USB drive stopped working all of the sudden on one specific computer. It works fine on the others and other USBs work fine on that computer too. What's going on? More...

Crafting CSS style sheet

This is the most time consuming operation in porting any CSS template to BlogEngine. If you like your design pixel perfect - that will cost you. These are some general tips that I hope will help make job a little bit easier. More...

Cool thing about open source is sharing. You give some - you get some. When it comes to themes, there are tons of great free designs out there on the web for applications like blogs. Some of them are generic CSS templates, others specifically designed for popular open source projects like WordPress. This tutorial is about converting WordPress theme to BlogEngine, but most of it very much applied to almost any web template in the universe. 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!

Running public web site from your basement is unprofessional. I know that. For a couple years I'm running my own internet facing toy server at home as a sandbox project. Let me tell you - I'm still working on that 99.99999% uptime. 5-6 times a year my house loosing power, sometimes it comes back right away but it doesn't matter - server is going down and patiently awaiting me coming back from work. This alone means realistically 40-50 hours downtime a year. Sometimes it looks like my ISP goes down, too (may be he also running from the basement?) and I have to reset router to be able to connect again. Yet dependency on external DNS (I use DYNDns). And don't forget that you'll need to maintain it, patch, upgrade software, install new stuff with many-many reboots when you counting it year long. All that put together, and you got totally unreliable site that is constantly, chronically down. More...

When working with Widgets framework in upcoming BlogEngine 1.4, you have three choices for saving widget settings to data store: StringDictionary, XmlDocument and CustomObject. StringDictionary is really a simple one and will fit your needs in a lot (if not most) cases. XmlDocument provides more flexible data storage excellent for complex hierarchical data structures, but it might be a daunting task to handle. You might look at LinkList that comes with standard install on example of using XmlDocument. Custom object provides you with familiar way of working with complex data, but it has it's own gotchas. I'll try to address some of them here. More...