After a lot of hard work I am very please to present the BlogEngine.NET for anyone to download and use. The blog engine is for anyone, but designed specifically to .NET developers that like to push software further than intended.

BlogEngine.NET may be the simplest and most light weight ASP.NET blog at the moment, but still full featured. Here are some of the features:

1. Multi-author support
2. Pingbacks and trackbacks
3. Event based for plug-in writers
4. Theming directly in master pages and user controls
5. Gravatar and coComments implemented
6. Live preview on commenting
7. Full editing and creation of pages that are not posts
8. Extended search capabilities
9. Tag cloud
10. Self updating blogroll
11. Runs entirely on XML. No database needed

To get stated using the BlogEngine.NET, go to the website – a website built on the engine.

To getting started using the blog engine, there are a few things you should know.

Download

First of all you should download the blog.

It is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive License. Basically it means that you can do whatever you want with the source code.

Set up users

After download, locate the App_Data/users.xml file and open it. This file contains login information about all the users of the blog. The user name is the name that is being used as the author of the posts, so remember to spell correctly. This is actually all you need to before you can log in and start writing.

Themes

Themes are located in the theme folder – each in their own folder herein. The name of the folder is also the name of the theme. Right now there is only one theme, the same as this website is using.

You can use all the pages and user controls you want in order to build a theme. The only rule is that it includes a site.master and PostView.ascx file. The PostView.ascx file must inherit from DotNetSlave.BlogEngine.BusinessLogic.PostViewBase. Other than that, anything goes.

Future updates

This is the first release of the blog engines, so there is going to be a lot more releases in the near future. When an update is available it has to be downloaded from this website and uploaded to your own.

All updates will not affect the content of the App_Data folder where all the posts, pages and files are located. Neither will there be a change to the file format that isn’t dealt with otherwise. It will not affect your custom theme either. However, if you have changed other parts of the blog, you should look at the update to see if any of your changes has been affected.

Extensions

Something soon, I will add a shared page (probably in an iframe) within the admin part of the blog, where everybody can add links to their own extensions and plug-ins. It will also get an RSS feed so that all owners of the blog engine can be notified whenever a new extension has been announced. The same goes with themes.

Suggestions and requests

If you have any features you’d like to have implemented in future releases, don’t hesitate to tell me.