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!

Maybe I’m wrong but after 8 year in web development, 4 asp classic year, 2 year transition to .Net world and last year doing heavy development on asp.net 2.0 I think that I may have a good opinion on the best resources online for the asp.net development.

I was thinking sometime ago about give the credit to the great work of
Mads Kristensen  and his .NET SLAVE blog, to me, the best blog around the blogsphere when talking about ASP.NET development. But I’ve been kinda lazy and never did so, today I read a blog post from HIM asking about some stuff , you should read here.

After playing around with all free resources online to see coding techniques and styles (forums, tutorial, blogs, Starter “piece of s***” kits, I easily can say that Mads’ blog is the best asp.net blog around, why? Because if you see around and read a lot of asp.net blogs an related technologies, forums, you can find good code but NEVER believe me NEVER the complete solution, or not a quality solution, and to make it even better Mads “KISS” approach just make his blog articles perfect. I understand that people shouldn’t give away everything they know, that everybody’s problem to decide to share or not.

Small, concise, ready for deployment in must cases,  an the best of all, HE SHARES real solutions for real problems on real scenarios, his code snippets are piece of gold when you have the enough criteria to judge. I don’t want to sounds like a biased person, I don’t know Mads personally but I bet you he is a great person why? Because persons who SHARE KNOWLEDGE, - not just simple knowledge –I’m talking about real knowledge, is great people. I invite you to read his blog everyday and if you can donate when find something useful I encourage you to do so ( I should do that to J) Read all the post Mads wrote, I guarantee you that would be amazed to read all that valuable asp.net an C# stuff.

I will make a resource or blogs list that I read everyday that keeps me on track on latest news, trends etc, related to an asp.net developer but now I just feel necessary to give Mad something small back compare to his great knowledge.

As I said Mads code snippets and opinion rocks, and here is my favorite ones.

Latest: http://madskristensen.dk/blog/Search+Engine+Positioner.aspx Search Engine Positioner, I saw this yesterday  and now is used in our marketing department, very valuable tool for SEO (search engine optimization) , Mads If you read this, this is my "wish a song", Proxy settings, to use 3^rd party proxies, this is very useful when doing SEO out of the US because Search engines give results depending on your IP country so if you do search engine marketing for another country rather that yours ( in my case Costa Rica) that would be very valuable).

Some other favorites:

• Remove HTML comments at runtime
• An HttpModule that moves ViewState to the bottom
• Permanent redirection in ASP.NET
• Spam proof your website using an HttpModule
• A whitespace removal HTTP module for ASP.NET 2.0
• HTTP compression in ASP.NET 2.0

And many more, if you put together all the code Mads provides you can build a great software library to a small general purpose web shop.
Thanks for all, Mads keep sharing, keep rocking!
Visit the .NET SLAVE BLOG now !

If you had a holiday rush as some of us did maybe you missed some news about Visual Studio Service pack 1 being release.
Scott Guthrie (asp.net, iss, product manager at Microsoft) release today on his blog some really valuable information about this. He points to really good links like

• Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Released
• Installing VS 2005 SP1 on Vista (and how to uninstall the VS 2005 SP1 Beta on Vista)
• HTML Source Editing Performance Improvements in VS 2005 SP1
• Tip/Trick: How to Run a Root “/” Site with the Local Web Server using VS 2005 SP1

But also more useful information, check it out the whole post: A few VS 2005 SP1 Links and Information Nuggets

Just want to say happy new year and succes to all the people at ArtinSoft and especially to our blogs readers, this year we have a lot of new things coming, just no migration stuff, but new tools and products that hopefully everybody will love, especially people in the web development world. At this point can't tell more about it...

In the other hand I'll be sharing more knowledge and tips about Asp.net and migrations from ASP to ASP.NET  and of course .NET related information.

Stay Tune !

If you are starting to develop Asp.net application with Visual Studio 2005 and learning about the thousands of new cool features of  asp.net 2.0 you will find that the compilation model is really different.

To me was very confusing in the beginning understand the new compilation model or features. Playing around -before reading documentaion first- I find that there some command line tools that  you can use to understand the different ways to do it, however it's difficult to understand if you don't read the new compilation model documentation.

I want to share about a tool I used since I found it, it's called West Wind Web ASP.NET 2.0 Compiler Utility, it's very simple to use and in my case, it helps me to understand better the compilation options I have with the asp.net 2.0 model.

So give it a try and I hope you like it.

Checking ScottGu's Blog the other day, he pointed to some useful links, I specially like the UrlRewriting library, I'm considering using it so wait for updates for my experience with it. I recommend to check that library it looks really good.

Via ScottGu's Blog

UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewrite V2.0 Released: Albert Weinert sent me mail on Friday pointing me at the new release of the UrlRewriting engine that he and Thomas Bandt wrote for ASP.NET. It is available as a free download and includes samples + full source code.