It doesn’t let you save anything, Windows Azure doesn’t like it when you try to write to the filesystem, but it shows the posts & loads the theme. And with only minor changes!

I used the manual from “Cloudy in Seattle” to get an existing ASP.NET app running on Windows Azure, to get started. Because ASP.NET is an older application we still had a referce to MSBuild 8.0 in the proj. file and the Azure packaging tool didn’t like that so I removed the following from the web project.

  <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" 
Condition=" '$(Solutions.VSVersion)' == '8.0'" />

Further I added a dummy log file to the logs directory to make sure that directory was avaialble got created. And made sure all files which are required have the Build action set to content:

The final thing to do is make sure you use the IIS 7 web.config file and disable tracing.

<trace enabled="false" />

And we have an UI.

The BlogML import/export functionality for dasBlog is planned for a future release, but as soon as the project has officially moved to Asp.Net 2.0 it will be available in svn and the dailybuilds.

What features do you want for the import and export functionality? Currently it's an all or nothing operation, but things like selecting a date range for the export could be useful. And other suggestions?

BlogML is an XML format for storing the contents of a blog; either for archival or migrating to a different blogging engine.

BlogML currently supports the following engines:

• Community Server
• Subtext
• SingleUserBlog

And I finished a beta implementation for dasBlog today.

The current BlogML format does not support all the features dasBlog has, so the following information is lost when exporting your blog using BlogML:

• Post specific languages; the language information for a post made in a different language than the default is lost;
• Only trackbacks are exported; Pingbacks and referrals are lost; 
• Attachments are not imported in this build;
• Some properties of comments are lost (useragent, ip of user);

The current driver program is very basic, and requires some hacking to switch between import- and export-mode.

Note: although dasBlog is a .Net 1.1 project, this is written using .Net 2.0 as per the BlogML project.

download: dasblogml.zip

"Always-fresh" releases of dasBlog are available from http://www.paulvanbrenk.com/blog/bits. These builds are made from the subversion head hourly, so these may not be the most stable, but are the most recent.

Changelog for dasBlog 1.9.

If you want to make a contribution check out this article by Scott Hanselman, about contributing a patch to dasBlog.