I'm thinking about using BlogEngine.NET to launch my blog. I'm a C# programmer and was wondering was BlogEngine.NET has in the belly.
Does it scale well? Is it caching properly? Is it memory intensive? Can you easily add/remove functionality?
I also accept any hosting recommendation :)
I'm running BlogEngine.Net. I don't know about scaling because my weblog isn't that popular (yet). I'm very happy with it. I tried subtext before and I had some stability problems with it, it logged exceptions that I found hard to debug. I got an error exporting the database to BlogML and it messed up the order of my blogposts. BlogEngine.Net seems a lot more stable.
I'm running on a virtualized server hosted by a friend of mine. I have seen no performance issues but that might be because of the massive 15 visitors per day peak load. I've have some trouble where Live Writer posts blog entries twice, but I suspect this is Live Writer's fault.
I really like the extension model and the way you can drag and drop extensions on the design of your blog. There aren't much themes that support this yet but I created my own look and feel by changing the standard theme in about three hours.
It runs well for us. I did see very rare situations where memory skyrocketed when we were getting a DDOS (appeared to be some kind of a memory leak) but in general, it works fine. We don't run the most popular blog, but we did get good amounts of traffic for some of our posts.
We wrote our own plugin for our purposes, as well.
I've tried dasBlog, subText, and BlogEngine.Net, and I personally think that BlogEngine.Net is overall the most solid open source .Net blogging platform. But as with most open-source project, you should expect to put it a little elbow grease in order to make it look and behave like you want. For instance, I've had to modify the core and recompile in order to be able to show comments on the front page of the blog.
I've experienced a bit of weirdness with the caching. Sometimes changes don't show up right away. If it really started to cause problems then there's probably a setting somewhere in the config to work with. But overall caching isn't an issue for me.
On the other hand, the platform runs really fast for me, perhaps because caching is working well.
I'm currently working on implementing my 4th blog/site using BE.Net. I am very happy with it and am looking forward to contributing to the project in the near future. I used to be a big fan of subText, but BE just blow it out of the water. Plus the subText revs aren't very frequent, and Haack is looking to rewrite the whole thing in ASP MVC, which is interesting, but ASP MVC isn't something I want to have to learn just so I can skin and customize my blog instance.
Regards.
I'm running it on Mono. I imported my posts from livejournal and written some extensions for my needs. It has some issues with Mono and internationalization, but overall I like it very much - it is pretty easy to understand and modify it, if you are .net developer. Speed and logic of working is good. Can tell nothing about stability or caching, because I haven't experienced slashdot effect so far.
Please do your research on supporting BlogEngine.net on webfarms or clouds. BE.net was never designed to work in these environments and there are a few hacks to help....
All posts are stored in memory (I found this out when looking how they did their search engine), so am a bit anxious how this will scale.
Otherwise, it is well written!