Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Omar pulled the trigger and we released DasBlog 1.9.7. Download it.

A few points to note about this release.

• This is the final release on an ASP.NET 1.1 codebase. No bugs will be fixed unless this release kills a kitten.
  • NOTE: To be clear, even though this is compiled under ASP.NET 1.1, it runs GREAT under .NET 2.0 as is. Just follow the comments in the web.config to change a few settings.
• The next release will literally be in a week or so, will will be called DasBlog 2.0 and will be compiled under .NET 2.0 and have changes to support Medium Trust environments.
  • This will allow folks downloading the source to compile DasBlog happily with VS 2005 or Orcas, or just MSBuild.
• We'll announce a one year roadmap with our plan to move towards .NET 3.5 as well as a new release every 60 days.
• We will very likely move to a location that is not SourceForge.
• We'll have a visual refresh of the main project page as well as some consolidation, but for now:
  • DasBlog.Info - For DasBlog information.
  • DasBlog.us - For "us," the DasBlog forums
  • DasBlog Mailing Lists - Subscribe to either the Developer's list, or the Checkin's List to see what's going on.

UPDATE: Alexander Groß has the definitive guide on How To Secure Your dasBlog Installation.

In this release we've fixed some and added some:

• Fixed a metric buttload of bugs
• Taken in more patches from the public than any other release (Thanks public!)
• Category and Home Page Paging Macros
• LiveComment Preview (thanks SubText!)
• Emailed Daily Activity Reports
• Windows Live Writer Custom Integration
• Support for Akismet Comment Spam Support
  • Go get a WordPress account, without a blog, and use the API key they'll send you.
• Optionally show comments on the Permalink Page
• Even more performance gains (4x+) in the Macro engine
• New Internationalized Languages, including Swedish (Thanks Per Salmi!)
  • This brings our total supported language count up to 15! Although we can ALWAYS use more, and we really need double-checkers and updaters to put in localized strings for some of the new features!
• Support for Blogging directly from Word 2007
• Many fixes in our Blogger API and MetaWebLog API support
• Better detection of referrals from Search Engines
• CSS fixes and additions like highlighting of the Blog Author's comments
  • Make the comment email address match the email address in sitesecurity.config for this feature.
• DHTML Timeline of Posts from the MIT Simile project
• Support for SMTP Servers like Gmail for notifications
• New themes
• Support for THREE Rich Editors - FreeTextBox, FCKEditor and TinyMCE (in DasBlog Contrib, see the source)

Thanks to the DasBlog team and the active folks on the Developer List (in no particular order)....

Omar Shahine, Clemens Vasters, Tom Watts, Ken Hughes, Paul Van Brenk, John Forsythe, Nick Schweitzer, Kenneth Lefebvre, Ben Scheirman, Tim Sherrill, Alexander Gross, James Snape, Raymond Llewellyn, Tony Bunce, Josh Flanagan, Aaron Fischer, Anthony Bouch, Ayende Rahien, Ben Taylor, George V. Reilly, Greg Hughes, Mike Schinkel, Marc Mercuri, Rajiv Popat, Tim Sherrill

...and the many patch contributors!

When selecting a Blog based on ASP.NET, I encourage you to check out DasBlog but also these other .NET based blog engines:

• BlogEngine.NET
• SubText
• Community Server (not Open Source)

Enjoy.