Jwendl.NET

Edit: I have stopped work on this functionality as I was able to integrate BlogEngine and GalleryServerPro

I am providing a "pre-release" version of my photo gallery control for BlogEngine. There were a few things I considered when making this control (and not going with other solutions that exist).

• No third party assemblies (that means everything written from scratch).
• Keep business logic and control logic inside one contained .DLL file.
• The interface with BlogEngine will be through an extension.
• Follow the BlogEngine method of abstracting data types and resource files.
• Make the gallery control easy to setup and use.

With these goals in mind, I hope that my assembly + extension will be considered as part of the core of BlogEngine. If I do not accomplish this goal, well then I have a pretty kick arse photo gallery for my personal use.

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This BlogEngine instance uses the Asp.NET Membership Provider, and it was actually quite easy to convert. Big kudos to the team who has worked on this Blog software.

Comment out this code inside Web.config

  <membership defaultProvider="XmlMembershipProvider" >
    <providers>
      <clear />
      <add name="XmlMembershipProvider" type="BlogEngine.Core.Providers.XmlMembershipProvider, BlogEngine.Core" description="XML membership provider" xmlFileName="~/App_Data/users.xml"/>
    </providers>
   </membership>

   <roleManager defaultProvider="XmlRoleProvider" enabled="true" cacheRolesInCookie="true" cookieName=".BLOGENGINEROLES">
    <providers>
      <clear />
      <add name="XmlRoleProvider" type="BlogEngine.Core.Providers.XmlRoleProvider, BlogEngine.Core" description="XML role provider" xmlFileName="~/App_Data/roles.xml"/>
    </providers>
   </roleManager>

Replace it with this code

  <membership defaultProvider="SqlMembershipProvider">
    <providers>
      <add name="SqlMembershipProvider"
          type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider"
          connectionStringName="BlogEngine"
          applicationName="JwendlBlog"
          minRequiredPasswordLength="5"
          minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" />
    </providers>
   </membership>

   <roleManager enabled="true" defaultProvider="SqlRoleProvider">
    <providers>
      <add connectionStringName="BlogEngine" name="SqlRoleProvider"
          applicationName="JwendlBlog"
          type="System.Web.Security.SqlRoleProvider" />
    </providers>
   </roleManager></pre></div>

Then you have to install the ASP.NET Membership SQL Registration program. Best described at this URL http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/040506-1.aspx

This was almost all you need to do to finish the conversion. The problem is that you need to now setup a default user of some sort. This can be easy, or hard depending on how the WSAT installed your instance. Please read up on ASP.NET membership before you attempt to convert over. I had to manually set the roles up on the proper application and user inside the aspnet_UsersInRoles table. After that, login with the default user and everything works just fine.

The reason why this works is because the XmlMembershipProvider class inherits the MembershipProvider class that ASP.NET provides. This means that all of the functions that BlogEngine uses for authentication are extensible to any custom membership provider that you can dream of.

I have developed a fairly decent way of getting my gamertag on my website side bar without using Iframes. It uses an API that was developed by Duncan Mackenzie. I just take the data and place it on my SideBar.ascx for BlogEngine. This script will work pretty much anywhere though.

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