Everyday I have a loft of stuff to write about on my Blog, but as you can see, it doesn’t always happen. Now it is time to do get back on track!
As a member of the team of open source project BlogEngine.net and its first release just out the door, now it's time to tell my story.
Some time ago I wrote about .Net slave Blog and its good stuff. After that, Mads contacted me about my post just to share a couple of gentle words.
Then I found out that Mads wants to create a new Blog engine with some really cool features in mind, specially:
- Written entirely in C# and ASP.NET 2.0
- Small in size and source files
- Plug 'n play implementation (just copy to web server)
- No third-party assemblies
- Using ASP.NET themes and skins
- Easy to extend using plug-ins
- Many more…
Thinking about developing a new Blog engine these days is a risky thing to consider. When you already have a bunch of well done and well tested solutions, along with good development teams, starting from scratch is a thing that should be considered over and over again.
How did I get involve and why?
I got hooked up immediately after reading the simple specs I mentioned above. Then I checked the first bits of BlogEngine and liked the approach so fast that I immediately started wondering to myself about getting involved. I contacted Mads and got hooked. I also want to mention here that when Mads told me about moving the project to Codeplex and use team server Explorer, believe me, I was super skeptical. To my surprise, I can now tell that using both Codeplex and Team Foundation Explorer has been a really great experience.
Why use BlogEngine.Net?
Because, after trying many other Blog engines out there - developed with ASP.NET of course – you can easily find some problems. Or maybe not exactly problems but different implementation methods for different situations, in a way that is so complicated you end up disliking the engines because of the lack of SIMPLICITY. I tried some engines like .Text, Subtext, DasBlog, Community Server and others. Those platforms are really good, but maybe in a context where you don’t have to extend, because when you think about extensibility or customization, you can get into a non ending trouble, especially when you want to do something simple and end up learning a framework/platform that, in some cases, you have to debug through hundreds of classes just to get used to the code and understand how things work. For some people like me that like full control, even when you did not write the software, this is just not an option. No matter if I’m on the team or not, I will use BlogEngine.Net because it has all the ingredients an ASP.NET web developer loves when dealing with a Blog engine: easy to setup, easy to extend and easy to understand.
Now celebrate the first release
Today, I want to join Mads making the first official release of BlogEngine.Net. Go visit the BlogEngine.Net website and have a look at project and why not, setup your next Blog with it. Congratulations to all the BlogEngine.net Team for the first release. Cheers!