I am slowly getting up to speed with dasBlog, and I have to say I am impressed… and confused! However the confusion is correctable. It stems mostly from not yet being able to get my development environment up to speed. ( I use VS2005 exclusively and dasBlog was and remains written for and in VS2003 and .NET 1.1 )

There are some posts that help with setting your development environment up for VS2005 such as the one here as well as reading through some of the forums and of course just plain hitting Run and seeing what blows up.

What I am impressed by is the fact that unlike several other open source projects the current developers seem to encourage contributions and patches. I can’t say the same for efforts like an unnamed blog engine I used before, where a submission goes unacknowledged and posts to their forums disappear after a day or two with no explanation.

And from what code I have seen, it looks in way better shape than most, so that is hopeful. Some of the rest of my confusion stems from the fact that dasBlog uses flat files for content storage as opposed to a database. And category lists seem to be driven by use not a stored list.

This makes it sort of difficult for someone using an external tool to blog with. I use BlogJet myself and am very happy with it, however either it or dasBlogs implementation of the Blogger interface do not yet support Categories that it does not obtain from the blog engine. In other words the category must exist already before you can use it in BlogJet. So the solution (Clarification: The solution was provided to be my Scott Hanselman not my own discovery, after I sent an email asking about the issue.) was to create a placeholder post and assign it every category I thought of (and periodically have to edit it to add new ones) just so I can use them in my external tool.

But as I get more familiar with the engine and the code, I should begin to learn the reasoning behind these decisions and be in a better position to comment on them then.

Cheers,

Robert Porter