The last couple of months working on BlogEngine.NET have been hectic and we have come a long way since we started. A lot of features have been suggested by the fast growing community and early adopters and we have tried our best to accommodate them all. The BlogEngine.NET team and I are very pleased to see so many people are going live with BlogEnginge.NET as their main blog engine and we want to thank all of you.

New features

A lot of new features have been implemented so far and some are still to come. New themes have also been designed so there should be something for every taste. If you want to create your own theme, it has gotten much easier and much more powerful than before.

Website

Within the next couple of weeks, we will launch the official BlogEngine.NET website with full documentation, tutorials, tips ‘n tricks and much more. The site will of course run on BlogEngine.NET.

Release

In around the same time as the website launches, BlogEngine.NET will be released in several different versions.

• Visual Studio solution with full source code
• Web project for easy upload
• Web project as an installer file

Support

The website will be the starting point for all support and we will make sure to provide all the information needed to answer almost any question. In the case you won’t find the answer on the site, you are able to get in direct contact with the members of the team. More on that later.

Because of the very frequently change sets we release on CodePlex, it will be very difficult to do support on all of them. So we are only going to provide support and write documentation for the official releases. Meanwhile, we try to help out and answer questions from everyone who is running the beta bits. The roadmap of the next couple of releases will be published after the first release.

So far so good

Up until now, everything has been going well and at a phenomenal pace. The original principles about creating a full featured, light weight, simple blog engine with no use of third-party assemblies have been achieved. We just need to get the last couple of things in place.

Google is great for search driven development when you are working on your .NET project. The problem is that you get search results from many different other technologies as well, so you have to do a lot of filtering in the results. Also, you often click on a result that point to bad solutions or in worst case, inaccurate solutions.

Not any more. Dan Appleman has created a search engine, www.searchdotnet.com,  that is build upon Google that only search in .NET related websites and blogs that he has manually chosen. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and it dramatically increased my searching productivity for .NET related topics.

He handpicked the best resources that will most likely give you exactly what you are looking for without you have to go through 5 pages of results. It’s build in ASP.NET of course. Give it a try, it's brilliant.