Jack @ ASP.NET

Prism was designed to help you design and build rich, flexible, and easy-to-maintain WPF and Silverlight applications. The Prism Library implements design patterns that embody important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling. Using the design patterns and capabilities provided by the Prism Library, you can design and build applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but that can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application.

Prism is designed around the core architectural design principles of separation of concerns and loose coupling. This allows Prism to provide many benefits, including the following:

• Reuse. Prism promotes reuse by allowing components and services to be easily developed, tested and integrated into one or more applications. Reuse can be achieved at the component level through the reuse of unit-tested components that can be easily discovered and integrated at run time through dependency injection, and at the application level through the use of modules that encapsulate application-level capabilities that can be reused across applications.
• Extensibility. Prism helps to create applications that are easy to extend by managing component dependencies, allowing components to be more easily integrated or replaced with alternative implementations at run time, and by providing the ability to decompose an application into modules that can be independently updated and deployed. Many of the components in the Prism Library itself can also be extended or replaced.
• Flexibility. Prism helps to create flexible applications by allowing them to be more easily updated as new capabilities are developed and integrated. Prism also allows WPF and Silverlight applications to be developed using common services and components, allowing the application to be deployed and consumed in the most appropriate way. It also allows applications to provide different experiences based on role or configuration.
• Team Development. Prism promotes team development by allowing separate teams to develop and even deploy different parts of the application independently. Prism helps to minimize cross-team dependencies and allows teams to focus on different functional areas (such as UI design, business logic implementation, and infrastructure code development), or on different business-level functional areas (such as profile, sales, inventory, or logistics).
• Quality. Prism can help to increase the quality of applications by allowing common services and components to be fully tested and made available to the development teams. In addition, by providing fully tested implementations of common design patterns, and the guidance needed to fully leverage them, Prism allows development teams to focus on their application requirements instead of implementing and testing infrastructure code.

Can BlogEngine.NET be installed within an existing website?

Yes. Install it in its own folder and configure the directory it resides in as an application in IIS.

Some hosting providers may not allow the level of trust used in BlogEngine.NET by default. If you receive an error similar to:

• “Parser Error Message: It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition=’MachineToApplication’ beyond application level.”,

You can try one of the following to resolve the issue:

• Comment out the “trust” line in web.config
• Ask your hosting provider if they can configure the directory where BlogEngine.NET is installed as a virtual directory.
• Ask your hosting provider to verify that the directory has been configured as an application in IIS.

How do I update the “About the Author” section of the blog?

In the default Standard theme, edit the content of this section by clicking “edit” in on the side bar of your blog.

An alternative way to display About the Author information is to create a ‘Page’ in the control panel. The Title of the Page can be About the Author. Enter information about the author in the WYSIWYG editor. Once the page has been created, you can add a link to the About page on your blog. This can be achieved by adding a Page List widget, or by adding a TextBox widget with a hyperlink to the About page, or by editing your theme file (site.master) and adding a hyperlink to the About page.

Is BlogEngine.NET open source and completely free?

Yes. BlogEngine.NET is built by passionate developers who have too much spare time, just to make an open source blog engine to give away absolutely free.

Is my mother able to use it?

Yes. We have gone to great lengths to make BlogEngine.NET as easy as possible to use – both from an end user as well as a developer or theme designer’s point of view.

What are the demands for the web server?

The only thing needed to run BlogEngine.NET is a web server that support ASP.NET 2.0 and write permissions on the App_Data folder.

What database is it running on?

None. BlogEngine.NET uses XML to store all posts, pages etc. by default. However, if you prefer to use a database, BlogEngine.NET includes a “DbBlogProvider” that allows you to store data in databases which support standard SQL — MS SQL Server, MySql, SQLite and Vista DB among many others. Configuration changes necessary to store data in a SQL Server database can be found. If there isn’t a data provider already available, you can easily write your own provider. We have enginereed our framework to make this very easy and simple to do.

How can I switch where data is stored (XML to Database or vice versa)?

If you’re just starting off with BlogEngine.NET, all of your data will be stored in XML files in your App_Data folder. Some web hosts such as GoDaddy who have an automatic BlogEngine.NET setup option, might setup your blog so data is stored in a database instead. If your blog is new, you don’t yet have any data, and you want to switch from XML storage to Database storage