Some exiting things have been going on with BlogEngine.NET lately.

Theme-pack

13 new and very slick looking themes have been cleaned up, bundled and released on CodePlex. Since we decided not to include more than a couple of themes with BlogEngine.NET 1.4 we knew a theme-pack was necessary. Thanks to Janko for gathering the themes and cleaning them up. Download the theme-pack.

.NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

The current version 1.4.5 is the last official version on .NET 2.0 and in Visual Studio 2005. Right now the team is already working in Visual Studio 2008 and will upgrade to .NET 3.5 during Christmas. A lot of people asked for this, so now we are giving it to you.

Windows Live Writer 2009

Al Nyveldt has been in contact with the Windows Live Writer team to ensure that the BlogEngine.NET will support the new features of WLW 2009 and vica versa. Only BlogEngine.NET and Wordpress has been given special attention by the WLW team which we are very proud about. Read more on Al’s blog.

TinyMCE upgrade

For those of us who don’t use Windows Live Writer, but prefer the online HTML editor, there is good news. We are upgrading the TinyMCE implementation to the newest version and it should work much smoother. It’s not only prettier, it’s also better. Hopefully, this will happen over Christmas as well.

It’s about 1½ year since BlogEngine.NET saw the light of day, and one person has been on the team almost from the very beginning. Of course, I’m talking about Al Nyveldt. We’ve been planning, designing and developing BlogEngine.NET all this time, but never actually met since I live in Denmark in him in Pennsylvania.

Well, now it’s about to change because I leave for New York City in a few hours and Al has agreed to meet up with me there. If you want to have a talk about the past, present and future of BlogEngine.NET, then meet us at noon in the Hilton hotel near Central Park – it’s this Friday, October 3rd.