One of my unpublished gripes with the DotNetNuke blog was that it was a pain to make work with WLW. One of the cool things with BE.Net is that it does work with WLW, not only that but it works well. Setup was a breeze and within 2 minutes I'm now writing my first post, including tags and categories (hit F2 if you're trying to do that in WLW).

Now this is cool! :)

Well my first real post on BlogEngine.Net is...about BlogEngine.Net!

After running the import program from my old DotNetNuke blog I found that the importer had worked, but that the blog entries had not shown up. This was because the cache that BE.Net uses for the XML data files. Since I'm on a shared hosting I couldn't just run an IISReset.exe, so I obviously needed a work around, and here it is:

1.  Open default.aspx.cs in Visual Studio (or just a text editor)
2. Add the following to the Page_Load function:

   BlogEngine.Core.Post.Reload();

3. Save and upload default.aspx.cs, refresh your blog.

Et voila, posts will appear. Phew.

I miss WordPress. I miss the fact that it would save my work periodically, and that if my session timed out while the I was writing a blog, it would be there when I logged back in as an unpublished daft. I miss having my categorised posts. I miss having tags to tell me what I've written about. Even Google seems to prefer my old blog, old pages that don't exist are returned where these ones sit in anonymity.

It's not that DotNetNuke isn't good, because it is. It's powerful and has a load of really good add-ons and...it just isn't WordPress when it comes to blogging.

All that said, I've burned my bridges - my web host is .NET only. Somehow I need to find some blogging software in .NET that is free, open source and comes close to WordPress.

Perhaps it portends a slightly fruitless search when my first result takes me to a blog post from 2005 with the same lament, why can't I find some .NET blogging software that's as good as WordPress?

Ever the optimist, here's my (very) shortlist I am going to look at:

BlogEngine.Net - The most promising bit of .Net blogging software I have seen, could it be a WordPress equivilent for MS junkies?

Community Server Express - Certainly mature, certainly powerful, but I get the feeling I'll end up with the same frustrations and a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

dasBlog - Not even sure if this is still developed, it's written in .Net 1.1 but it looks quite mature.