So you can tell me what you think on the new design, or any other thing (like what you think on the new changes to AspView, how you like working with the Castle stack, how great AspView is, how good looking I am, and any other kind of constructive criticism).

If you're reading my blog through a feed, please update your link to http://feeds.feedburner.com/kenegozi if you hadn't yet, the web server would appreciate it.

sneak peek (for those who read this through a feed reader):

cool huh?

Sorry.

I need to do that, at least for a few days.

If you want to leave a message, mail me:

blog at the-domain-name-of-this-blog (without the www part, of course ...)

I haven't monitored the blog's comments for only a week, and now I've had to delete 988 spam messages.

I guess I'm going to re-do the comment mechanism really soon.

It is possible though that your reader might want to update last 20 posts.

Next step - some look'n'feel improvements.

Did an upgrade, did it bad, Syndication is down (no atom feed).

fixing it soon.

I'm upgrading the blog now, so it might be a bit quirky for a bit. Please be patient.

Also, if you are a I-comment-on-the-blog-and-tick-remember-me kind of guy, then please check your details next time you comment, and then re-tick the remember-me thing, as there was a bug in the cookie storing method.

I did that MonoRail / AspView talk yesterday at August's IVCUG (that's Israeli Visual C#/++ User Group) at Microsoft offices in Raanana, Israel.

I was a great experience for me, and I thank all of you who came in, asked questions, left some change in my hat (damn, I forgot the hat), and (hopefully) had a great time.

The presentation will be uploaded here soon, so will the demo code, and the promised zip with AspView executables for castle build 472 (revision 4016) + stub web.config. It's just that I need to actually WORK today since the last days was more "prepare to presentation" that "work for a living" kinda days.

So, tune in. It would be by here this weekend.

Meanwhile you can go over aspview source code (there's AspViewTestSite that demonstrate many of MonoRail and AspView features. It's quite old and when I wrote it I was quite a MonoRail newbie, so stuff there are not necessarily best-practice quality, but you can grasp how to use subviews, viewcomponents, viewfilters, etc very easily).

http://svn.castleproject.org:8080/svn/castlecontrib/viewengines/aspview/trunk/

You can also look over my blog engine's sources that I have presented yesterday. It's at:

http://kenegozi-weblog.googlecode.com/svn/

The code shown was from going-ddd branch.

bad name btw, as the model is too simple for DDD, and I also violate it from time to time ... (Repository<Comment> ...)

Today I was informed by Dror that although I managed to redirect all requests to html/aspx url's on my blog (the ones that dagBlog was using) to the new pemalink format, I forgot to do the same for the old syndication link.

So that link was http://www.kenegozi.com/blog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss and now it's http://www.kenegozi.com/Blog/Syndication/Atom.aspx

I could've used the monorai redirection module that is already in use on my blog, but I chose to do it differently, with a dedicated handler, just to show how easy it is do to such stuff, even without a full blown redirection engine.

So, I've added this:

public class SyndicationRedirectionHandler : IHttpHandler 
{
    #region IHttpHandler Members
    public bool IsReusable
    {
        get { return true;}
    }

    public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
    {
        context.Response.StatusCode = 301;
        context.Response.Redirect("http://www.kenegozi.com/Blog/Syndication/Atom.aspx");
    }

    #endregion
}

and that line into web.config:

<add verb="*" path="SyndicationService.asmx" type="KenEgozi.Com.Weblog.SyndicationRedirectionHandler, KenEgozi.Com.Weblog"/>

Voila.

Today we tried to have this in a view's parameters section:

<%

    int id = default(int);

%>

It won't work.

Internally, AspView looks for a parameter (in the PropertyBag, Flash, Form, QueryString etc.) with the name "id".

Now if it is not found, it should set to "default(int)". The problem is duw to a bug in AspViewBase (which is the base class for all views) that sets a null value if the property is not found, thus failing the cast to value type (you cannot (int)null).

I'll add a test, fix the bug, and commit it, hopefully by this weekend.

Meanwhile, we "solved" the problem by using:

<%

    object id = default(int);

%>

The newest addition to the blog engine.

From the subversion commit comment:

Some refactoring to avoid code duplication
Added support for CommentsAtom - a feed with all of the comments in a blog, used for tracking purposes by the blog writer

Now you can access http://the_blog_url/Syndication/CommentsAtom.aspx and get a feed of all the comments.

Useful as a tool for the blog writer, as it enables tracking of comments all over the blog

as usual  -  sources are here.

just added a blogroll.

To the DB, to the Domain, to the controller and to the view.

Took me (all in all) 30 minutes, including all the coding, CSS-ing, uploading to the webserver, setting up the DB table on the hosted server, adding a few entries, clearing the browser's cache, and viewing it.

ah, and committing changes to Google code.

All of that was made in the Budapest Airport cafeteria, while waiting for my flight home (was a great trip. Photos, though not many of them, will be posted later on).

Rest assure that the DB access code is tested, and that the calls to the DB and to the cached data from the Controller and View are all typed.

I'd like to thank NHibernate, Castle and AspView (hey - that's me !), who made this possible.

I bet Ayende would have done it in 20 ...

Just added.

Commited to the repository, too (hosted at google code).

Look for the link on each post's footer.

Since this blog is running on an engine that I wrote (available on Google code site, here), it lack some features that more mature blog engines already have. (the other engines lacks the combined power of ActiveRecord/MonoRail/AspView ...)

So, that's currently my list:

1. Blogroll, for obvious reasons.

2. Email alert for me when anyone posts a comment for one of my posts.

3. Comments feed (via ATOM).

UPDATE - Done

4. Email subscriptions for new posts, or new comments on specific posts.

5. I have a problem with the font. I should fix the CSS but the Internet connection here (I'm at a Budapest hotel) is quite poor. Will be fixed next week.

UPDATE - Done

Any other suggestions?

note that I do not intent on implementing Pingbacks and Trackbacks, since those were littering my blog in the past.

So long dasBlog. It was great to have you, but it's time to move on.

After a lot of work, I am proud to announce that my blog is running on MonoRail, using AspView for the views, and ActiveRecord to do DB stuff.

Not too fancy codewise, since I have very little spare time.

Most of the time spent on the blog upgrade process was on:

1. Exporting the data from the "old" blog, and

2. making a decent markup and design for the new one.

oh. and 3. letting WindowsLiveWriter do the edits, since I wasn't in the mood to create a backoffice.

I'll blog more about the process, and I'll make the source available.

Please leave your comments here about the overall look'n'feel. There must be tons of bugs and I want your feedback.