It’s been awhile.

My last entry is almost two years old, written right after we launched Visual Studio 2008 in Germany, a product we will soon consider obsolete (on April 12th, to be precise). And while I did start to blog on our team’s blog, my personal site became a wasteland of comment spam sprinkled with a few actually real comments.

So after laying flat for the last three days after catching a terrible cold at Bayern Munich’s 3-0 win over Mainz last Saturday, I sat down this morning and checked out the latest versions of BlogEngine.NET and AtomSite. While both did a wonderful job importing my SubText content via BlogML, I eventually decided to migrate to BlogEngine.NET: It’s mature, there are tons of themes available for it that look nice and don’t mangle my existing content, and its configuration is way less esoteric than AtomSite (and way better documented).

Strangely, it was also only today that I discovered that my hosting provider supports direct access to my hosted SQL Server databases right from SQL Server Management Studio. Previously, I had to use Web Data Administrator, which only diehard .NET developers will likely loathe remember. Using SSMS I was able to deploy a local installation of BlogEngine.NET, create a new hosted database, and run the local installation with the hosted database to migrate content and test the system, while the live SubText web app remained untouched. Neat!

One thing that didn’t survive the migration are permalinks (at least I made no effort to do so). Sorry about that, but I preferred to have the new platform up and running over maintaining perfect compatibility.