First things first - setting up dasBlog

Setting up dasBlog isn't hard at all. Actually, it's a breeze if you have just basic knowledge of IIS. Knowing ASP.NET won't hurt either, but you don't need to program in order to use the software, unless you find a silly nagging bug that drives you crazy…

In my case, some of the advanced features of FreeTextBox like color pickers or the code formatter wouldn't work — all I got was a security error. After digging through dasBlog's forum over at GotDotNet, I found the problem. In SiteSecurity.cs, there are two calls (lines 60 and 71) to HttpServerUtility.MapPath() that do not properly specify the path to the config file. Fixing it easy — prepend a root path reference "~":

   1:  using (StreamWriter writer = 

   2:    new StreamWriter(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~/SiteConfig/siteSecurity.config")))

If you want to rebuild dasBlog, make sure to map a virtual directory called "DasBlog" to dasBlog's web application project directory. For example, I have put the project tree on the path C:\Shared\WebApps\DasBlogSource. Thus, I had to map the virtual directoy "DasBlog" to C:\Shared\WebApps\DasBlogSource\newtelligence.DasBlog.Web. Oddly enough, Visual Studio .NET 2003 refused to load the web application project while loading the solution. I simply ignored the error and was able to reconnect to the web project from within the project tree (there's an option in the project node's context menu).

So here I am in blog space.