I've decided that I need somewhere to dump my thoughts, on technology and life in general.  I promised myself I would establish my web presence this year, and this blog will be part of that.

I did have some criteria for choosing which platform to use for this initiative:

1. Has to be .NET based.  I write C# code and use the .NET library at work, and I run mono on my Mac at home.  I didn't want to have to learn a new language and technology platform to be able to understand how my web site works.

2. Has to be extensible.  I need to be able to plug-in my own controls to extend the architecture, using C# and .NET as per (1).

3. Has to be simple.  I really value simplicity, especially when I'm building something from the ground up.

After looking at DotNetNuke and mojoportal, I finally settled on BlogEngine.NET, an open source project from Microsoft.  Although it doesn't have the large userbase of DotNetNuke, or as many features as mojoportal, I was able to get my site installed in about 10 minutes, without any issues.  I had some probems with mojoportal's database configuration, and DotNetNuke is written in VB.NET.   BlogEngine.NET uses xml as a backend, with the option of going to database later on, so that made it easy to get started.  MSSQL is built in, unfortunately that isn't available on Mac OS X, so one of my first extenions will be to add mysql support.

 I will continue to blog on my experiences using BlogEngine.NET.