Some comments on dasBlog after playing with it for a week.

  • No comment spam! Worth the purchase price alone
  • Lots of data in the Activity section. I like the clickthroughs because it's helping me find dead links leftover from the .Text conversion.
  • Navigating to previous days in the Activity section is kind of a drag. Particularly because it defaults to today's date when you switch from one category to another. And separate dropdowns for Month/Day/Year has never been a favorite navigational construct of mine.
  • One thing I miss from .Text: the ability to see all comments in one place. I don't have e-mail set up properly on my server so I'm not notified when comments come in. Luckily, my readership is relatively mute. (update: forgot I changed my password recently. Still would be a nice feature, though.)
  • Project is much easier to hack than .Text.
  • Just noticed now: Something wrong with the DateTime picker in the Add Entry screen. I think I need to include a reference to the aspnet_client library in my IIS settings for the site.

And finally, converting to .NET 2.0 was not easy but not because of dasBlog. The instructions on this are crystal clear and work fine...provided you have the correct version of Scott Guthrie's Web Application Project. I guess I didn't originally because after several conversion attempts, the web project absolutely refused to convert over as a web application project.

What I did get was a regular .NET 2.0 website with all the string resources moved to the App_GlobalResources folder. Opening the site gave this error:

"Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture or the neutral culture. Make sure "newtelligence.DasBlog.Web.StringTables.StringTables.resources" was correctly embedded or linked into assembly "App_Code.el7nt025" at compile time, or that all the satellite assemblies required are loadable and fully signed."

I'm positive this is because, as a .NET 2.0 website, the project no longer has a default namespace so all the string resources were being referenced incorrectly. I'm sure I could have changed the reference in ApplicationResourceTable.cs to remove newtelligence.DasBlog.Web from the namespace but the instructions were pretty adamant that they were correct.

Anyway, removing the Web Application Project and re-installing the most current version worked. There's also a chance that VSTO2005 mucked something up because when I installed the Visual Studio 2005 update to allow the Web Application Project to run, the VSTO2005 installation procedure launched a little sum'n-sum'n first. Regardless, if you get this error, do what I did and all should be fine.

As to why I needed it converted to .NET 2.0, well, that's still ongoing so you'll have to wait.