Welcome to my blog.  Anyone who knows me will be really surpised to find I have a weblog, whenever the subject came up I always said "I can always find something better to do", but lately I have been learning so much new stuff particularly with VS Extensibility (VSX), WPF, XAML, Rx and Silverlight that exited me enough to want to tell someone about it.

With VSX particularly I learned so much by piecing together little titbits from all over the place I actually sat down and started to put together a book, I actually wrote the first few chapters in between contracts, but then I thought about it and decided a book took up too much time so after some time looking around at other ways to document what I was learning it dawned on me that this is exactly what a weblog is for.

Of course the next decision was where to blog, do I use one of the many shared sites or do I set up a private one on the dedicated server I maintain for web sites.  It occured to me then that I hadn't updated my personal web site for a long time and it might be a good idea to replace it with a blog.  Of course then I had to decide on which blog engine to use.

Since I work exclusively with .NET technologies it seemed wrong to use anything other than a .NET blogging engine.  I googled for ".NET Blogging Engine"  and found a few, I downloaded half a dozen and set them up on my local machine.  To cut a long story short I found most of them didn't work as expected or at all but I found Subtext "did what it says on the box" and provided all the functionality I wanted.  It was easy to set up with a slick UI that fired up the first time I browsed the site and it just works as expected.  My second choice was dasBlog but this lost out on the setup procedure which was effectively a manual process.

Anyway welcome again to my blog, I will be using this like a "black book" to document what I learn about the technologies I work with and if anyone finds it helpful then it was worth the effort.

Mike Hanson