There is a great post (http://nyveldt.com/blog/post/Windows-Live-Writer-Customization-for-BlogEngineNET.aspx) by Al Nyveldt on getting the two to play nicely together.

Well I have really neglected my blog over the last 1.5 years!  I originally decided to write my own blog software just because I could.  Well the fact that I became very busy the first thing to be neglected was this blog.  So I decided to final start changing that by moving to a blog solution with more features than I had but also allow for me to customize it when I wanted to.  In addition to what my current solution already had I wanted the following:

• Track back
• External API for using Windows Live Writer or some other thick client blog authoring software.
• The ability to insert pictures or files right into the post
• The ability to apply themes
• Open source
• Extensibility

So I choose BlogEngine.NET because it had all the current features my solution already had (which wasn't a big list) and many more.

Added the ability for the blogger to receive emails when a new comment is posted to a blog entry.

Added the ability to contact me by email via a contact form.

I added a feature to allow for user comments.  I used a CAPTCHA technique to keep the spam down to a minimum.  Spam was always a problem in my .Text blog.

Added some blog statistics on the home page.  Currently I am only tracking the number of blog, comment and trackback entries.  Later I might add more statistics or allow the numbers to be constrained by some start and end date so I can see numbers for a specific time frame.

I added in the ability for my site to receive track back pings.  The pings get logged into a database table.  I only allow one trackback per Url and Blog Unique Id.  I also added the ability to only allow trackbacks if the Url is really referencing the blog identifier it is attempting to ping.  This should hold down spam some.  I still need to do the following around trackbacks:

• Add in the ability for this site to ping other sites. 
• Add the ability to remove trackbacks in the admin pages
• List trackbacks on the Blog Detail page
• Add the ability to show a count of all trackbacks 

I went ahead and added a single RSS feed to my site.  I ended up using the RSS Toolkit that can be found on Dmitryr's blog.  It was very easy to get the tool kit to publish RSS.  I need to bounce the RSS XML format against the 2.0 specifications to be sure I am emitting decent RSS. 

I had one problem with the control that comes with the tool kit.  I attempted to create multiple channels based on the Blog Catagories that I have defined in case someone would want to subscribe to only a specific catagory.  However when I placed this control in a repeater whenever a post back occurs I get an error stating this "is not a valid virtual path".  I suspect it has something to do with the control when it is trying to append the ChannelName to the query string.  For now I just removed the subcatagory RSS feeds.

Well I decided to move my blog off of .Text and onto a custom blog application that I am writting from scratch.  I didn't really have any problems with .Text but I wanted to create some new features and I did not have the source.  So as it stands right now I have limited blogging features in my custom solution.  I was able to migrate my data out of .Text and into the new schema without much issue.  I have some old links to the old blog that will have to be changed.

I will be slowly adding the following features:

• RSS Feeds - Done 6/4/2006
• Ability to add comments
• Blog search
• Support for blogging API so that I can add blog entries from a smart client application
• Submit blog entry by email
• Ability to create blog entries but delay the publishing of the entries - Done 6/10/2006