Scott Hanselman

Congratulations to the team, dasBlog 2.0 is out and it runs on Medium Trust. There are numerous small bug fixes, but the move to 2.0 and Medium Trust support is the major feature. However, the fact that we are on 2.0 (and many of us are building on 3.5) will allow us to do some pretty cool innovation pretty quickly. Clemens Vaster is back on the team and checking in some "dasBlog 3.5" architectural spikes that are worth looking at. They can be found, as always, in the source via anonymous Subversion to https://dasblogce.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/dasblogce/trunk.

Upgrading

The upgrade is simple, just back everything up, copy all DLLs and AS?X files. The only manual process is that you should merge your web.config with the new default one that includes a few ASP.NET 2.0 specific tags. Make sure your virtual directory is set in IIS to be an Application and that Application is set to ASP.NET 2.0.

Getting Help

If you need help with dasBlog, you've got a number of options.

• Start with the dasBlog Home Page.
  • Thanks to Tom Watts for maintaining the home page and generally kicking the teams butt!
• There's also the dasBlog Help Forums.
• You can also submit bugs, feature requests or submit patches.
• Finally, you can join the dasBlog Developers Mailing List.

Hosts that Support dasBlog

There are a number of commercial hosts that support dasBlog. That should mean that they won't say "huh?" when you ask them to setup your blog. Here's the ones we know about. If you're a host that supports or wants to support dasBlog, join our Developer Mailing List and start a dialog with us.

• Appliedi.net
• ServerGrid.com
• WebHost4Life
• DiscountASP.net
• Crystaltech
• Server Intellect
• Brinkster
• ActiveHost

Medium Trust

From my previous post on our Medium Trust Issues:

Tony Bunce has a fine write-up on the issues we ran into with dasBlog on Medium Trust. Here's some highlights:

"The goal of medium trust is for hosting providers to provide functional ASP.NET 2.0 hosting while also protecting against rogue or malicious applications. Unfortunately that protection comes at the cost of application flexibility. ...There are a few features that are limited in a medium trust environment: SMTP on alternative ports and Mail to Weblog via POP3...dasBlog will let you know that you don't have these privileges by displaying warnings on the configuration page.

There is some good news though, these limitations won't affect most users.  Many hosting providers that run limited trust environments don't run in the default medium trust, but rather a "modified full trust".  In that case you may already have all the permissions you need for all of the features to work."

Go check out his post for more details. The most interesting issue we bumped into was that you aren't supposed to be able to call out via HTTP on the server side to any other connections unless they match your originURL in your web.config. In other words, my blog at www.hanselman.com can't call to any other site that isn't hanselman.com. However, you can set you originUrl to a regular expression like ".*" and then you can connect anywhere. Phil Haack noticed this and got the fix from Cathal Connollys.

The Future

There's also some cool stuff going on around our pluggable editors, with John Forsythe setting up a YUI Editor as well as Rich Comments support for the folks who want to live on the edge. Do checkout the dasBlog section on John's blog for extra add-on macros and cool patches if you're compiling dasBlog on your own.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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