I have settled on BlogEngine.NET after a week of evaluating various blogging engines!  Engines under consideration were Subtext, WordPress, dasBlog, Community Server, and more.  When it came down to it, there were three main criteria for selecting the new engine.  It had to be FREE!  It had to be based on .NET!  It had to be easily modified to support new capabilities such as .NET Framework 4.0, the Wicked Http Compression Module, and Azure.

Hello BlogEngine.NET!

There were a few things to get BlogEngine compiled under .NET Framework 4.0.  First, I had to change the target framework in the BlogEngine.Core and BlogEngine.Web projects to use .NET Framework 4.0.  The BlogEngine.Web project referenced older versions of the .NET assemblies (ex. System, System.Web, etc.) and needed to be updated to point to the new versions.  Along the way a new reference needed to be added to System.Web.ApplicationServices.  Once done, it compiled!

Compiled is one thing, actually working is another.  There was a weird error regarding "Request Validation".  Making the following change, <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" />, to web.config did the trick!  For more details, check out this discussion.

Along the way I changed the default storage provider from XML to SQL Server.  This blog is currently running on SQL Server 2008.

Of course having written an ASP.NET Http Compression Module it only made sense to use it instead of the compression built into BlogEngine.  It actually helped with performance.  It turns out that BlogEngine likes to default to the Deflate algorithm for compression.  I prefer to use GZip compression.  Also, BlogEngine does not compress WebResource.axd resources.  Enter the Wicked Compression ASP.NET HTTP Module!  I have been updating it for the past month for use with .NET Framework 4.0 and Windows Azure.  There will be a few enhancements based on the work with BlogEngine!

I am using a theme based on the Arthemia theme from WordPress.  This particular theme was adapted by someone over at Onesoft.  Modifications have been made to fix some bugs and the theme will be enhanced to be current with the latest BlogEngine.  That is unless I find another theme I like more.