Welcome to my blog. Anyone who knows me will be really surpised to find I now 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 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