Wednesday, September 06, 2006

BlogML 2.0 Released

by Keyvan Nayyeri via Keyvan Nayyeri on 9/6/2006 5:54:29 AM

Finally third version of BlogML released (0.9, 1.0 and now 2.0).  After moving BlogML project to CodePlex we started working on new version with new features and bug fixes.  The most important change was it became really Open Source and some guys like me could join it.

As I mentioned in one of my previous posts and add some new items now, version 2.0 comes with these new features:

• Multi-author content
• Post excerpt
• Blog extended properties
• Post view statistics
• Post names
• Special post types (such as articles)
• Reading post attachment MIME type in .NET APIs

In addition to those new features we had some bug fixes and a major change in post attachments.  They're now working under ASP.NET 2.0 Medium Trust level.  Previously we was fetching the data for attachments via a WebRequest which isn't allowed in Medium Trust level on most ASP.NET 2.0 shared hosts.  Now we don't embed external attachments and developers can do it in their tools.  If you're going to use BlogML under Medium Trust level, should know that it will work if you have permission to use IO operations in a custom Medium Trust configuration (this is allowed on all shared hosts I've seen).

As is obvious, new version is fully compatible with .NET 2.0 and you can't use our .NET APIs with .NET 1.1.  All BlogML .NET APIs are written with C# 2.0.

I'll try to provide some code samples about using our .NET APIs later but the best way to know more about it is viewing real converters.  I'll release my Community Server 2.1 BlogML converter very very soon and also there are Single User Blog and SubText converters coming soon.

I think this new version is a good improvement for BlogML to support more common features in blogosphere.

This is the .NET class structure of BlogML 2.0 which can help you to know what's going on behind the scene:

I was lucky enough to get involved in this project with Darren Neimke and Phil Haack.

Speaking of releases, you can call me Release Man because I launched three public releases for three different projects in about one month.  But BlogML was completely different from CSModules and Windows Live Writer Plugins projects.  BlogML took more time and we worked on it as a team but in those two projects each developer works on his own project.  On the other hand, generally BlogML has some major differences with many other projects.  It doesn't have a real output.  Most things are abstract and this makes things harder.

However, go ahead and download BlogML 2.0 specification as well as .NET API binaries and sources code from here.  Converters come very soon.

Read Darren's post about this release.