In relation to my post some days ago about social coding and DVCS, I had a great sample the other day why this is so great. I recently upgraded my blog to the latest version of BlogEngine.net, which wasn’t easy. I guess most of my problems were because I went from version 1.5 to 2.5 or something, which is a pretty big jump. Nevertheless, I had a lot of problems to just make a clean installation of BlogEngine.net work on my host. My blog runs on Shared-hosting, which gives some wierd problems from time to time. I managed to google my way to resolving all the errors I ran into – that’s great! I were still a bit pissed as I it were way to hard to make a clean installation work, so (I’m honest here ) I flamed a little on the discussion on BlogEngine.net’s codeplex.com site. Yes, I maybe shouldn’t have done that, but I did, was to tired of this not working. An actually something great came out of this, look at the response to my comment here. Source This rtur guy is pretty smart, he tells me contribute with my changes – which I honestly hadn’t thought about (as patching use to be SO hard and stupid on Codeplex and I don’t even want to come near it – sadly. A little side note, look at the time stamps. From he suggesting me to contribute, it takes me less than an hour, actually much less than an hour (I wasn’t at the PC right when he wrote that), to contribute to the project as described below – pretty look! More...

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I have now hear about the ability to blog from LIVE writer on the blog engine.net as I’m using, and today I decided to give it a try. It actually works pretty simple and easy. Get LIVE writer from http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/ (I use the beta) Install it – Note that it will install a beta version of MSN Messenger, which I couldn’t find a way to avoid. LIVE writer will ask for you blog url, username and password. LIVE writer den get some information from your blog and after a while, you are ready to start blogging on your blog from a desktop application instead of web. You may think - “Why should I blog from a desktop application, when I can blog from the web?”. Well, I don’t really need to blog from a desktop application, but I most say it actually seems pretty sweet and easy as I’m sitting here writing this first blog, but back to the question. People that isn’t that much familiar with the web, maybe find it “hard” to blog from the administration via the web and maybe find it easier in a desktop application, as it is more familiar to them. Let’s try some feature, let’s insert a picture: It opens up the file browser on my PC here, and not my image folder at my blog. And now that I have inserted the image and selected it, I have some different kinds of possibilities. Oh my god, this is nice! I just took at screenshot as I’m writing this blog, and just CTRL+V and bang! It’s in the post. That is actually VERY handy :) Let’s try that again so I can show you what else I can insert: Wow, I can crop a screenshot too! Sweet. Hmm it’s in Danish, damn, sorry for all the English speaking people out there. Well, lets’ try inserting a Map:     Also seem to work fine. That most be all for now, it actually seems to be pretty handy anyway, as a desktop application add much more features than the web based administration. Now let me publish this post and see if all the images etc. get uploaded to the web too.

So this were the day that I got BlogEngine.Net up and running. I looked at the engine about a year ago, but skipped it again because I at that time just had setup my previous blog and couldn't over come to setup all the style and design again. I'm a programmer, not a designer :) This week one of my colleages told me that he had downloaded the engine and said that it were so easy to setup and style. Today I had time to try it out and I most say that it is VERY easy to setup! I haven't even read any of te documentation or anything, just did what I guess were needed and it seems to work very well.  So the setup was easy, but what about the style? Pretty fast I found the "themes" folder and saw the site.master. If you have worked with ASP.NET before, no further instructions are needed here. All you need it in the "themes/template-name" folder. Couldn't be easier. So right now I'm a happy developer with a brand new blog.