Considering a switch from dasBlog to BlogEngine.NET

I use dasBlog for my blog engine and recently there have been discussions on the dasBlog dev mailing list about its future. The current discussion centers around starting a new code base and leveraging Microsoft’s new technology. As a result I decided to take a look around at other .NET blogging engines starting with BlogEngine.NET. As advertised it’s very easy to setup and configure which is a good sign. The next step was to import my existing blog data including posts, comments etc. and I found Merill Fernando’s post on this subject helpful, thanks Merill!

Merill’s post lead me to Paul Van Brenk’s dasblog BlogML importer which worked great after a minor tweak for comments without author names that caused the export to fail. Thanks to Paul for providing source thus allowing me to save time and tweak his code and get the import working. The problem was a null reference exception importing blog comments which was easily fixed with a simple check.

Once all my data was imported it allowed me to realistically play around with BlogEngine.NET and experiment a bit. While in some cases it has some advantages over dasBlog there are a few issues that would prevent me from easily switching. The first would be ensuring my existing URL’s continue to work which could prove to be a bit of a challenge. I also have a few issues with things like meta tags though that’s would be easy to fix.

Even though BlogEngine.NET does offer some flexibility not available in dasBlog I’m beginning to think that perhaps holding out to see what happens with Microsoft’s MVC framework and in the dasBlog community itself may be the best option.

I’d be interested to hear from BlogEngine.NET users their opinion and what they like/dislike about it.

Lastly, is there another Open Source ASP.NET blog engine I should consider?