Visual Studio 2010 is released today so I thought I'd download it from the MSDN site and have a look. Of course, so is everybody else in the world and the download is crawling. Thinking there must be a way to get it quicker, I turned to google and found this site, which must be Tip of the Decade. I've gone from 7hrs remaining at about 20KB/sec to 336KB/sec and 1hr left!

Credit goes to http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/11/20/speed-up-and-download-faster-from-microsoft-msdn-downloads/

In order to speed up the MSDN application downloads, the developers or subscribers need to make sure that the web browser will always connect and access to US-located servers. Following the following steps to achieve this:

1. Edit the HOSTS file located at %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts by using Notepad or any other text editor (make sure that you have Administrator Rights when using Vista with UAC turned on).
2. Add an entry to the HOST file for the global US Microsoft server: 207.46.252.185 global.ds.microsoft.com
3. In Internet Explorer, add https://global.ds.microsoft.com to the list of Trusted Sites (located in Tools > Internet Options > Security > Trusted Sites).
4. In Internet Explorer, always allow cookies of https://global.ds.microsoft.com regardless of privacy policy by going to Tools > Internet Options > Privacy, and click on Sites button. Enter the URL (https://global.ds.microsoft.com) to Address of Website and click on Allow button.
5. If the download has already begun and half way through, suspend the MSDN download and select or activate “Place application shortcut on the desktop” in the Microsoft File Transfer Manager Options in order to resume later.
6. Open command prompt and run the command “ipconfig /flushdns” or simply reboot the computer
7. Start Microsoft File Transfer Manager from the desktop to resume download from MSDN.

If you've read my previous post, you will have seen how I recently discovered a way to post a picture from Flickr, directly to my blog, using the MetaWebLog API.

I promised that I'd write up how do this, so here you go. It's fairly straightforward to do and should only take a couple of minutes.

Step 1

Go to http://www.flickr.com/blogs.gne, logging in if necessary. You should see a screen like the one below:

Click "Set up your blog" to continue

Step 2

When asked for the type of your blog, select MetaWeblogAPI enabled blog and click Next.

Step 3

Enter the appropriate details for your blog. The API endpoint is the base URL for your blog with metaweblog.axd added to the end, so if my site is http://www.tumelty.com/blog/, I would need to enter http://www.tumelty.com/blog/metaweblog.axd

Remember to add the directory if your blog is not in the root of the server. 

Step 4

Confirm that the details are correct. If you get an error at this point, check the URL you entered and your username and password. Remember that these should be the ones you use to log into your blog, not your Flickr username/password.

If everything looks good, click "All Done" and you're done! 

Step 5

This screen should confirm that your blog has been successfully added. You can now play about with the templates, or choose one of the preselected templates.

To post an image to your blog, open it up in Flickr, and click "Blog This" in the toolbar. 

Hope this is useful! 

If you are familiar with Wikipedia, you may have seen the random article link which selects a random page from the many thousands. This small extension does something similar.

At the moment this just renders a hyperlink which points to a randomly selected post.  I hope to update this soon and turn it into a templated control so you can specify how the control is rendered and instead of using a plain hyperlink, maybe use an image or button, or whatever else you can think of

To install and use the extension, simply upload the file into the app_code\controls folder and insert the following code into your site.master page

<blog:RandomPost ID="RandomPost1" LinkTitle="Random Post" runat="server" /> 

You can download the file below:

RandomPost1.0.zip (836.00 bytes)

You can see the control in use in the left hand navigation bar just before the file download stats. 

Here's another really simple extension for BlogEngine.Net. This one allows you embed your xbox live gamercard into a post by simply typing the following (without the spaces near the [])

[ xboxgamercard:gamertag ]  -  Replace gamertag with your gamertag

The result looks like this :-

To Install, copy XboxGamercard.cs into the app_code\extensions directory.

You can download the extension below: 

XboxGamerCard1.0.zip (868.00 bytes)

In my short time using BlogEngine.Net, I've been amazed at the number and quality of the extensions and plugins that have been developed by the community. When I originally downloaded the software, I saw the ones listed on the site, a google search turned up a few more, and reading blogs from Mads and Al helped me find more.

I realised that there wasn't a centralised location for all these extensions anywhere, so I decided to make one.

Currently there 60 extensions listed and I'll be adding to these as I find them. If you spot one that isn't on the list, send me a mail, or leave a comment below and I'll add it on.

Last Updated: 25th February 2008

BlogEngine.Net Embedded Media Extensions

Extensions that allow media files to be embedded/played in a post or page.

BlogEngine.Net Navigational Extensions

Extensions that make navigation around your blog easier

BlogEngine.Net Syndication/Social Bookmarking Extensions

Extensions that allow you to submit blog entries to Social Bookmarking sites

BlogEngine.Net Statistical Extensions

Extensions that enable you to get stats about your blog

BlogEngine.Net Anti-Spam Extensions

Extensions to blog Spam on your blog

BlogEngine.Net Widgets

Widgets to add to your blog

BlogEngine.Net Hyperlink Extensions

Extensions which make it easier to link to external sites

BlogEngine.Net Admin/System Extensions

Extensions which help you to manage your site

BlogEngine.Net Input Extensions

Extensions to convert input into different formats

BlogEngine.Net Miscellaneous Extensions

Other Extensions

Incidentally, I'm using the toolbox extension built by Danny Douglass to automatically build my list. You can find out more about it here

I recently uploaded a BlogEngine.Net Control which made it possible to show a random image on a site theme.

I'm now going to use my other BlogEngine.Net creation, the Gallery User Control, to show all of the different images.

I've recently started using the BrightSide theme which was converted to BlogEngine.Net by Henrik Stenbæk (link below)

I really like the header photo on the homepage but though it was a shame that its always the same image. It would be great to show one at random, from a selection of appropriate images.

This got me thinking a little. Maybe I could put together a simple control which would enable the user to specify a directory of appropriate images and then write out the appropriate html to show a random image from that directory.

Well thats exactly what I did, and here it is to download.

RandomImage1.0.zip (1.35 kb)

To install, simply drop into the app_code/controls directory.

Here is an example of how I'm using it with the BrightSide theme. Click on the home page and refresh a few times to see the result.

First of all, you need to edit the css file to remove the background-image reference in #headerphoto. This is because we will be using our own random image, leave the height, width and border settings as they are.

Next, you need to edit site.master. Look for a div with the ID="headerphoto" and replace with this:

<blog:RandomImage ID="headerphoto" ImageUrl="/blog/themes/BrightSide/headerphoto/" runat="server" />

The css for the height, width and border will be picked up from the css file. When the control renders, it will render as in image tag with the ID of the server control, and the src as a random image from that directory.

You can optionally pass in CssClsas="CssClassName" if you would rather define your Css that way.

I've slightly enlarged the header image in the theme so I can get more on, but the concept is still the same.  Obviously all of the images need to be the correct size for this to work in this context.

I originally wrote this as a User Control which would have given flexibility to include this in a post or page, but it felt like this was more of a template (site.master) control rather than something to embed in a post/page.

You could use this for example, to do a random image on your sidebar.

Hope someone finds this useful, I'd love to hear any feedback. 

Download the Theme: http://www.onesoft.dk/post/2008/01/New-BlogEngine-Theme---Bright-Side-of-Life.aspx 

As promised, here is the first release of the BlogEngine.Net Gallery User Control.

The aim of this User Control is to make it simpler to display a folder of images in a blog post or page. Instead of having to manually insert an image for each image in the directory, simply add a reference to the Gallery User Control, and point it to the Url containing the images. The User Control will then automatically build a table of images and display on the screen.

The first time a Url is scanned for images, a small thumbnail of each image will be created and saved to disk. This may take a few seconds on the first page load, but subsequent load times will be much quicker.

The Gallery User Control makes use of the BlogEngine.Net Lightbox extension (if installed) to provide a nice popup view of the full image.

Full installation and customisation instructions, please check Gallery.ascx.cs in the .zip file

This has all been thrown together rather quickly so apologies for any bugs. 

Please send any feedback/bug reports to me and I will try and correct asap.

Thanks, Paul. 

Gallery1.0.zip (3.18 kb)

Demo: http://www.tumelty.com/blog/post/2005/03/Wedding-Photographs.aspx 

UPDATE:

I'm currently working on the next version of the gallery control and hope to add several more features as requested by users.

Over 100 people have currently downloaded the control which is great. If you have any ideas of what you would like to see, let me know and I'll do my best to get it implemented. 

I've been using BlogEngine.Net for a couple of weeks now and I've been very impressed with what I've seen. I'm finally able to update my website without needing to resort to SmartFTP!

Overall it's a very intuitive system, but one thing which I couldn't work out for ages is how to delete a page.  Deleting a post is obvious, if you are logged in as admin/editor, you can see the delete link next to the post options. Pages are slightly different. By default they don't show up anywhere on your site (unless you explicitly add them) so there is no easy link to delete. Also, if you go into the admin area and click Pages, the only UI available is to edit an existing page or create a new page.

The only way I can see to delete a page is to edit it, save it (this previews the page) and then go to the bottom of the page and there are two links, edit and delete. You can guess which one to click!

It's not obvious (to me at least, althout it is 1:00am) how to delete them. Maybe this is something that could be looked at in R1.4 or beyond. 

I've recently started work on a Gallery User Control to make it easy to insert sets of images into your blog posts. The user control is fully customisable via parameters and enables

• Auto Generation of Thumbnails for speedier loading
• Customisable Width/Height for thumbnail display
• User defined number of columns in Image Grid
• Integration with LightBox Extension

To use the control, all you need to do is embed it using the standard BlogEngine.Net method, passing in the appropriate paramters.

For example:

[ usercontrol: /blog/user controls/gallery.ascx ImageUrl=/files/images/wedding/;Orientation=1;RepeatColumns=6]

To see the control in action have a look at

http://www.tumelty.com/blog/post/2005/03/Wedding-Photographs.aspx 

The control will automatically use the LightBox Extension if available to show your pictures using the animated popup window. The first time you access the page, the control will also generate small thumbnails of your pictures which get saved to a /thumbs/ subdirectory of the gallery folder. Write permission needs to be enabled for this to work.

I have a little more tidying up to do but hope to release this to the community in the next week or so.