Daniel Palme

Daniel Palme

.NET consultant from Germany.

Blog > ASP.NET MVC - Developing a custom blog engine

ASP.NET MVC - Developing a custom blog engine


Oct 8

A few weeks ago I decided to start blogging. Since my website existed for some years I chose to write my own blog engine and integrate it into the existing layout. With Oxite an open source engine built on ASP.NET MVC already exists, but it has many features I do not need, thus I started to implement a more lightweight variant.

The following features are already implemented:

  • RSS-Feed
  • Embedding of images
  • File attachments
  • Comments
  • Tags
  • Search function
  • Receiving and sending pingbacks
  • TinyMCE, Lightbox and SyntaxHighlighter integration
  • Dependency Injection using Unity

Requirements

  • .NET Framework 3.5
  • ASP.NET MVC
  • MSSQL 2005/2008 (Express)

Setup

Setting up the blog engine is quite easy. The directory 'Setup' contains a readme explaining the necessary steps.
If you have installed SQLExpress 2005 /2008, you can run the blog by hitting F5 in Visual Studio (first set 'Website' as startup project); the database already contains some test data. If you want to use an other database you can use the provided SQL scripts (also in 'Setup' directory), and adjust the connection string in Web.config.

MVCBlog

Implementation

The Core project contains the business logic. For data access the Entity Framework is utilized, encapsulated by using the Repository Pattern. The service classes use the repositories for CRUD-operations and expose the relevant methods the UI/Website needs.
The Website project contains the ASP.NET MVC based UI.
All components are instantiated by Unity. Since the application runs in a web context, the lifetime of most instances has to be limited to the duration of a web request. Here you can find some information about a custom LifetimeManager which limits the lifetime of an object to a single web request using a HTTPModule.

Documentation

I did not write any documentation apart from XML-comments in the source code. So just have a look at the source. You may modify and extend it as you like.

Updates

07.02.2011: I have upgraded the blog engine to ASP.NET MVC 3.

Downloads

MVCBlog.zip

Tags: .NET, ASP, C#, MVC
 

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Comments

#1
sikat ang pinoy

sikat ang pinoy

01/30/2010 | http://www.telebisyonserye.info

I like blogengine.net powered by asp.net because this is the free technology that i can create modern website for my personal use or for business use. I would like to thank you for sharing your thoughts and time into the stuff you post!! Thumbs up!
 
#2
Blog

Blog

02/22/2010

Ho do I convert this project to vs2010 or do you have implemented a newer version of your apps cause i get an error converting the project
thx
 
#3
Daniel

Daniel

02/24/2010

@Blog:
I have not tried this yet. I will not provide a new version until Visual Studio 2010 is released.
 
#4
pacquiao vs margarito video

pacquiao vs margarito video

11/19/2010 | http://the-movie-vault.com/pacquiao-vs-margarito-video/

Its a pity you dont have a donate button, i would donate some =)
 
#5
Digvijay

Digvijay

08/04/2011 | http://digvijay.eu

Any plans for Windows Live Writer integration???

Nice work here!

/Digvijay
 
#6
Daniel

Daniel

08/04/2011

@Digvijay:
I don't have the time to integrate support for Live Writer at the moment.
 
#7
Kingsor

Kingsor

11/04/2012

Hi,
did you use the blog engine you made for this blog?
 
#8
Daniel

Daniel

11/04/2012

@Kingsor:
Yes, I used the blog engine for my blog as well.
I plan to move to MVC4 soon and will then publish an updated blog engine.