BlogEngine.Net – New ASP.NET 2.0 / XML powered Blog Engine Launched !

BlogEngine.Net is a new free blogging framework that Mads Kristensen launched on April 2nd. I downloaded it today and took it out for a test ride. Here are my first impressions.

• The first thing that struck me about BlogEngine.Net is it’s simplicity. As Mads says on his Getting Started page, you just change the username (and password) in the users.xml and you are good to go. After updating the users.xml, I created a virtual directory in my IIS and browsed to the home page and it worked ! I did get a feedburner error once, but that magically disappeared when I opened the home page in Firefox. Hmmm ?

  

• Like dasBlog, this engine also uses XML instead of a SQL database to store it’s data. What this means for individual bloggers on a shared host is that you save atleast 5 $ per month that you would otherwise be spending on an SQL Server database if you were using a .Net blogging engine like subText or the bloated Community Server.
• The in-site search algorithm and post ranking sounds very interesting.
• The source code for the blog engine is also included in the download. I was able to compile and publish the web site without any errors.

Overall, I get a very good feeling about this blog engine. Besides subText and dasBlog, there are not that many free frameworks out there that are .Net based. My first impressions of the BlogEngine.net is quite warm and fuzzy although several users have reported bugs and problems with the initial release, some of which Mads has promptly fixed in an intermin release just 2 days after the launch. I just hope Mads nurtures it and grows it into a stable supported free .Net powered blog engine in the coming days without abandoning it. It would also be nice if he uses Codeplex or Google Code instead of SourceForge, because SourceForge is ugly and its forum feature sucks and he may end up losing his user base !

Good Luck Mads !!