Today, I am proud to announce the next version of BlogEngine.NET is being released to the public. A lot of new features and improvements have been added along with new cool themes.

The BlogEngine.NET team and I are very pleased with this release, because it marks the continuous evolution of the project. Both the community and the team have been very innovative and have created a solid solution together. The community has done so much work on the project since the first release and it is only because of that we can release this soon. Truly amazing.

The performance is much better, the whole application is more stable and secure, and a lot of features have been added. A lot of small things have also been added or improved such as all the themes are 100% XHTML compliant and supports various microformats out of the box.

You can read the release note on the BlogEngine.NET website and you can download the new release from CodePlex right now.

There are different approaches to localizing an ASP.NET application. You can use a global resource file or local ones. The local resource files only applies to a single page or user control, whereas the global can be used from anywhere.

I’ve always used the global resource file located in the App_GlobalResources folder. I like that I can use all the text strings wherever I want. However, I have never used a local resource file for a specific page or user control for that very same reason.

Lately though, I’ve thought that the local resource file might be good for some specific scenarios. For instance if I know that a particular string is only going to be used on one specific page, then I don’t clutter the global resource file with page specific strings. However, then the information is spread over multiple files instead of just the global ones.

It reminds me about HTML style attributes and stylesheets. Is it ok to hardcode styles directly onto a page if the same style is not being implemented anywhere else? In my opinion yes, sometimes it makes sense, but I’m generally against it just like I’ve been against using local resource files.

Do you use local resources and if so, why have you chosen that instead of a global file?