When you have a web site, for instance an installation of BlogEngine, you often want to be able to know about errors on it and if it is down. There are a lot of tools to help you out here, but in this post I will talk about using a build-in ASP.NET feature called Health Monitoring and a tool I wrote called WebMonitor.

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So today it happened, finally, the new version of BlogEngine has been released. It comes with some major Comment Spam Protection changes, multi widget support and more. This is all great and I really hope that this can beat these bad comment spam bots, which I guess we all hate.

I have just upgraded my blog to this latest release and the upgrade went pretty good without any real problems. So far so good, now I just have to wait and see if the spam protection is working as intended.

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About two weeks ago I wrote this post about how we decided to try and change the focus on how we develop this game. We have for a long time coded on the “engine” part of the game, so we have something solid to build the game on. This is very exciting and very needed, we just started to hit a point where we felt like we needed to have something we could “show” people. We needed to have a simple “playable” prototype of the game that we could show people and they could try. There were mainly two reasons for this:

1. We were starting to have a hard time finding the motivation to code on the project, as all the things we did were “non-visual”, like all the engine work, which didn’t gave anything to the game, visually or game play-wise. Motivation is a pretty important factor when you are doing a hobby project like this :)
2. We are both (me and Allan Hansen) very interesting in designing code as good as possible, which is why we usually talk a lot of how we can do stuff before we start coding it. This actually a good thing, but in this case, we saw that we needed a different approach.

So, with the points from above in mind, we wanted to do something about it, which is what we did the last two weeks.

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