ASP.NET Blogging Software Roundup
During my adventures to find a replacement for WordPress, I tried out a few different blogging packages.
Please note I was trying to find blogging software with the path of least resistance. This roundup is very critical for my needs/wants. I'm know they're all fine (if you can get them to install) if you're starting a new blog, but porting from one system to another is never fun, even less so when the system has serious platform changes that include the database!
dasBlog
Installed fine, worked perfectly, uses XML instead of SQL (no dramas there), the only 'importer' for it was a BlogML importer. Fine, install BlogML exporter to Wordpress, exported fine and then….dasBlog BlogML importer failed to run.
It was pretty damn fast, I'll give it that. It comes with a fair few different themes, which is always nice, but the admin panel was certainly not overly friendly. I don't really want to write my own importer for it, so I decided not to use it.
BlogEngine.NET 
Defaults to XML, but does have SQL capabilities, but failed to 'run' properly. Couldn't get it running (either errors with the Web.Config, or with the software, depending on what I changed).
Apparently BlogEngine.NET is really nice, but I didn't want to have to fight the software just so I could trial it!
Later on I decided to install it locally, to see what I could get going. It's BlogML importer did a much better job than the others (that is, it actually imported most of my blog posts and maintained most formatting) - but it still wasn't flawless. This may be because of how Wordpress exported BlogML, or the BlogML definition, I'm not sure but the problems with it are/were:
- Posts from 2006 were dropped.
- "pages" get converted to blog posts
- "attachments", that is, something I've uploaded through Wordpress or Live Writer get converted to posts (ie, title = img-2786.jpg, with no post content)
- A few blog post titles were totally fubar'd
- Because I'm now using tags rather than categories, BlogEngine didn't pick up any imported categories/tags.. argh!
SubText 
Unlike the others, SubText requires a MSSQL database. After I got over modifying the ConnectionString (I guess I can't blame them for my stupidity), things appear to be good.
SubText has Import/Export to/from BlogML baked into it, which is definitely a plus. Of course, it failing to import was not exactly a good sign. I reuploaded the DLL, and it managed to process 16 of my blog posts…but still failed. Even the 16 it processed weren't of any use to me, the formatting was destroyed, and it split one post into three!
I don't even want to describe GraffitiCMS' horrible job of install instructions.
From trying all of these different projects, its hard to conclude anything but ASP.NET sucks as a blogging platform. Now, we know that ASP.NET is more than fine for any webapp, be it blog or ecommerce, but the current open source or free blog software for ASP.NET sucks. While this might be a tad unfair, there is at least one or more component in each of the four I tried that sucked all the fun out of blogging. Maybe because of my LAMP background, I just expect things to 'work' when you upload them…
I'm seriously considering writing my own (MahBlog?), but adding support for trackbacks, pingpacks, the metablog API (I suppose if it does have full metablog API/WLM support, it doesn't need to have a web interface to post…hrm…), as well as being able to import WordPress, 'clean' URL's, etc, just doesn't sound like an overly fun thing to just 'whip up'.