BlogEngine is a CodePlex-based project and uses Mercurial as source control. Most of described below equally applied to any CodePlex project that uses Mercurial. Here is step-by-step what you need to do to share your code on CodePlex.

Prerequisites

To work with BlogEngine you need Visual Studio 2010 (free express edition is fine) which can be downloaded from Microsoft site.

You also need TortoiseHg to move files to and from repository. If you used to work with TortoiseSVN you know the concept. It works as Windows Explorer shell and very easy to use.

Branching Out

First step is to create branch (fork) and clone code to your local computer. If you don’t have CodePlex account, go get one – registration is fast and easy. Once account created, log into CodePlex and navigate to BlogEngine and then go to “Source Code” tab. Hit “Create Fork” to create your own copy of code in the CodePlex repository.

Give your fork some descriptive name and click save button.

CodePlex will generate new branch and show you a URL where it will be stored. Copy it as you going to use it in TortoiseHg, we are done here.

Clone to Local

Now create folder on your local drive where you going to work with source code. In my case it is D:\temp\be, can be anything you like. Right-click this folder and choose TortoiseHg/Clone. Paste path to your CodePlex fork into “Source path” box and click “Clone” button, TortoiseHg will pull files from CodePlex to your computer.

You should be all set now to work with project files. BlogEngine structure is very simple, it has only two projects: web site and class library. Set website as startup project and default.aspx as start page and then hit “F5” – make sure Visual Studio can build and run project. Then do your changes, TortoiseHg will keep track on any changes you done.

Commit and Push

When you ready to save your work, you first save it into you local repository by right-clicking project folder and selecting “Commit” in the TortoiseHg menu. TortoiseHg will ask you to provide any description/notes for this commit, type in brief description of changes you done and push “Commit” button. Your work saved now on your local drive.

When all completed, you need to push changesets from your local repository to CodePlex. Again, right-click project folder and in the TortoiseHg menu group select “Hg Repository Explorer”. Review change sets you committed and if it looks good click “Push Outgoing Changesets” button. Tortoise will ask your user name and password at this point and copy all changes to CodePlex.

Go to CodePlex and make sure all changes showed up in your fork.

Last step – use “Send Pull Request” link to notify project team that you want your code merged into main project trunk. There!

At this point it is responsibility of the team to keep it going. Someone will receive notification, pull your fork and review changes. If everything looks ok, all will be merged with main trunk. You should always get back notification on the status of your request, even if it was not implemented.

It might look like a lot of steps but it really very simple and straight forward process. Have something you need to fix every time you upgrade to new version? Bringing it to the core project might be a good way of making your life easier and may be you’ll make someone else happy as a bonus.

Few people mentioned that my FlickrBar widget for BlogEngine.Net got out of sync with Widgets framework after framework got interface change. I have updated widget to work with latest releases including 1.6.0 and 1.6.1, you can download it using link below. Instruction on how to use are dead simple: move files in the corresponding location and widget will pop up as an option in the zone dropdown. Go to “edit” and enter what kind of photos you want streamed down to your blog, set number of photos to display, may be change CSS (for example, use “padding:2px” to get gaps between pictures). You can see end result on the right side bar in my blog.

FlickrBar.zip (38.25 kb)

Sorry about post title, could not resist :) You probably saw these "new" and "hot" links next to list items all over the place. Something was added or updated and it makes sense to put an indicator that clearly shows this. I wanted to do it for list of extensions on BlogEngine site, so that when something new added anyone could see it right away, because list is pretty large. And I don’t want to maintain it afterwards, that image should go away when it is not “hot” anymore, all by itself. How hard is this with BlogEngine and .NET? Walk in the park: More...

About a month ago I re-discovered that you can actually run email client on desktop and unexpectedly liked it. That is odd - I distinctly remember some kind of pain associated with this activity in the recent past, so I tried to sort this out. Mainly for myself, but may be someone else will find this useful or amusing. Desktop client I'm talking about is Windows Live Mail. It is free and light weight, generally you install it with new OS as part of Essentials package. More...

All improvements to comment management outlined in this post completed and now available in source control, so if you wish to give it a test drive I really interested in your feedback. This includes both Disqus and reCaptcha integration (credits go to Hamish Graham and Filip Stanek respectively. The plan is to make it finalized and available for download as service pack or optional update in the next couple weeks. By then, there are going to be testing, refactoring an clean up but hopefully no major changes. More...

Friend of mine sent me course of lectures recorded as mp3 files. All files untagged and named alphabetically. I decided to add folder to my music library to listen it on iPod. Should be easy. Now, here is a quick quiz: what will happen if you open some popular music management software, say iTunes or Zune, and do “add folder to the library” thing? More...

Looking at stats in several BlogEngine.Net 1.6 based sites, it seems like Akismet scores around 80% in accuracy on average, killing some 8 out of 10 spam comments. Which is pretty good but not outstanding. "Stop forum spam" filter blocks may be another 5%. Still, quite a lot of spam comments get through the filters. More...

Spam comments are annoying and sometimes looking at comment allowed by Akismet or some other anti-spam service you think – I’m sure I would do better. It is just so hard to get the plumbing in or I would made my very own solution. With BlogEngine.Net 1.6 it is not, you can easily implement your own anti-spam filter or add existing if you like it more than built-in Akismet. Here is how. More...

After few delays new version of BlogEngine.Net has been released. Although this release is mostly incremental with minimum breaking changes, there are quite a few improvements, enhancements and bug fixes to make it worthwhile for those stuck on previous versions to upgrade. Upgrade instructions can be found here, and you can download new version from the project site on CodePlex. More...

One real surprise for me was that not many people use BlogEngine as their sandbox and playground. To me as a developer from the beginning it was mostly a toy and only over time it grew up into something bigger with responsibilities attached, so I’m sort of impressed. It seems like what most folks really want is a stable mature product with great features and scalability built it. There is understandable desire for cool new tech on part of some but most seems really care about how it serve their blogging needs (ye, I know, shocking…). So in the end it looks to me like loud and clear call to power along with demand for more advanced and polished tools and features.