Switching to BlogEngine.Net

If you have experienced any weirdness with this blog over the past few days, I apologize - and will have to ask you to please bear with me for a little more: I have just spent part of the week-end switching from DasBlog to BlogEngine.Net. The brunt of it is done now (I reached the mythical “it’s 80% finished” point), but I still have to complete porting my old posts and review their formatting.

I decided to switch for two reasons.

First, I found BlogEngine more straightforward than DasBlog, which seemed a bit cryptic at times. If you have ever worked with ASP.Net before, you will find yourself in very familiar territory: it looks like a regular ASP.NET / .Net application, it uses masterpages and controls, the config file is short and sweet… I had no problem whatsoever creating my own theme, and getting the whole thing to work on GoDaddy, in about a day, thanks to this guy and that guy.

Then, BlogEngine seems to be picking up steam and becoming the de-facto reference for .Net blogging. Granted, this is more opinion than hard fact, but it looked like the CodePlex project page was very active, with a dynamic and responsive development team, whereas DasBlog has looked a bit quiet lately. Furthermore, developing extensions looks pretty easy, and there is a fast-growing list of them already on CodePlex and on the BlogEngine page, which is important also for widespread adoption.

So far, I am pretty happy with the switch, and regret one thing only. In the competition for the coolest name out there, you have to give it to DasBlog, hands down!