Jack @ ASP.NET

As a software engineer, I focus on .NET, especially asp.net, C#, WCF and so on, and I am also very interested in Search Engine Optimization.

Entries Tagged ‘Application’

FAQ in BlogEngine.NET

Aug.10, 2010 in asp.net, Programming Leave a Comment

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

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Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 and WCF RIA Services is now available for download

May.19, 2010 in .Net Leave a Comment


Silverlight Tooling Support

Visual Studio 2010 includes rich tooling support for building Silverlight and WPF applications.

It includes a WYSIWYG designer surface that enables you to easily use controls to construct UI – including the ability to take advantage of layout containers, and apply styles and resources:

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The VS 2010 designer enables you to leverage the rich data binding support within Silverlight and WPF, and easily wire-up bindings on controls.  The Data Sources window within Silverlight projects can be used to reference POCO objects (plain old CLR objects), WCF Services, WCF RIA Services client proxies or SharePoint Lists.


Silverlight 4 Tool Enhancements

Today’s Silverlight 4 Tooling Release for VS 2010 includes a bunch of nice new features.  These include:

Support for Silverlight Out of Browser Applications and Elevated Trust Applications

You can open up a Silverlight application’s project properties window and click the “Enable Running Application Out of Browser” checkbox to enable you to install an offline, out of browser, version of your Silverlight 4 application.  You can then customize a number of “out of browser” settings of your application within Visual Studio:

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Notice above how you can now indicate that you want to run with elevated trust, with hardware graphics acceleration, as well as customize things like the Window style of the application (allowing you to build a nice polished window style for consumer applications).

Support for Implicit Styles and “Go to Value Definition” Support:

Silverlight 4 now allows you to define “implicit styles” for your applications.  This allows you to style controls by type (for example: have a default look for all buttons) and avoid you having to explicitly reference styles from each control. 

In addition to honoring implicit styles on the designer-surface, VS 2010 also now allows you to right click on any control (or on one of it properties) and choose the “Go to Value Definition…” context menu to jump to the XAML where the style is defined, and from there you can easily navigate onward to any referenced resources.  This makes it much easier to figure out questions like “why is my button red?”:

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Silverlight 4 demos available now!

Dec.17, 2009 in asp.net Leave a Comment

Demos are available now, You can download the keynote demos at http://www.silverlight.net/community/samples/silverlight-4-beta/ (source code + VS project file included with each sample).

Keynote Demos

PhotoBooth Application

The PhotoBooth application demonstrates some of the fun things you can do with the new WebCam and Microphone support in Silverlight 4.  It allows you to record videos and take photos within the browser – and then optionally apply effects to them (for example: the bulge effect below).  For kicks you can publish a photo of any of the pictures to Twitter :-)

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BarCode Scanner

The BarCode Scanner application also uses the new WebCam support in Silverlight 4. It allows you to scan an ISBN barcode from the back of a book, and will then use Amazon web-services to look up details about the book online:

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Rich Notepad

The rich notepad application shows off some of the new text editing features in Silverlight 4.  It allows you to edit rich text within the browser, supports Bidi text (including Arabic and Hebrew), supports both left-to-right and right-to-left control layout (RTL is show below – notice how the scroll-bar is on the left hand side of the screen), supports programmatic copy/paste to the system clipboard, custom right-click context menus, printing, and drag/drop of files from the desktop into the browser to edit:

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HTML Hosting

The HTML Hosting application shows off using the new Silverlight 4 webbrowser control in an out of browser application (note: you must run the application out of the browser for it to work).  It allows you to use the control both interactively (meaning you can click the HTML within it and run it like an application).  It also allows you to use the hosted HTML as a brush that you can apply to other Silverlight controls. For fun you can click the MSDN.com tab below and you’ll get rick-rolled to YouTube.  You can still use the HTML as a brush and carve it up into a jigsaw – even though the video is still playing (using Flash hosted within the HTML):

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