myWebLog v2.1 is now available. There are some great new features in this release.

• Full podcast episode chapter support is now available. Chapters can be created using a graphical interface, and will be served for applicable episodes by adding ?chapters to the URL of the post for that episode. The documentation has a detailed description of this feature.
• Redirect rules can now be specified within myWebLog. While it has always supported prior links for pages and posts, this allows arbitrary rules, such as pages that direct to other sites, maintaining category archive links, etc. Its documentation also explains all about the feature and its options.
• Canonical domains can now be enforced within myWebLog. Adding the configuration for BitBadger.AspNetCore.CanonicalDomains will help enforce the use of www. (or absence of it), as an example.
• Docker images can now be built within the source. The plan for 2.1 was to provide those images from the outset, but rather than relying on an external registry, we plan to stand up our own for distribution of public container images. If no code changes are required in myWebLog before that registry is available, we will release v2.1 images with this current build; if not, we will do a point release for them.
• The version of htmx injected for the “auto htmx” functionality has been updated to v1.9.11.

In addition to these features, a decent amount of the development of this version included full integration tests with all three data storage backends. SQLite, PostgreSQL, and RethinkDB are all verified to give the same results for all data operations. (NOTE: SQLite users will need to back up using v2, then restore to an empty database using v2.1; this will update the data representation used in several tables.)

Finally, there are downloads for this release that target .NET 8, 7, and 6 - all the currently-supported versions of the .NET runtime. (The Docker images target .NET 8, which does not matter because, well, Docker.)

Head on over to the release page to get the binaries for your system! Feel free to participate in the project over on GitHub.

(Note: the link above now points to v2.1.1, which fixed an issue with PostgreSQL upgrades between v2 and v2.1. Upgraders from v2 can safely (and are encouraged to) go straight to 2.1.1.)

Today, we released myWebLog version 2 (release candidate 1). This project has been roughly 8 months in the making, replacing the 6-year-old v1 with a completely new application.

v2 supports all of the things v1 supported - revisions, prior permalink redirection, etc. - as well as posts and pages written in Markdown, podcast generation, uploads, and administrative actions, all from within the application. Additionally, it supports both RethinkDB and SQLite for its data storage; using the latter, it will run without any further configuration.

There is a lot to be said about it, and most of it is in the documentation; take a look at it. There are a good many features you would expect, and some that you may not; I'll include a few highlights here.

• Existing support for several Podcasting 2.0 elements, with plans to incorporate even more
• Theming via a collection of Liquid templates
• Out-of-the-box support for RSS feeds overall, by category, or by tag
• Multiple web logs can be hosted by one installed instance
• A lightning-fast admin interface, powered by htmx

The bits are available on its release page; happy blogging!

When we began developing C# web applications, we found ourselves in the position of determining what the best way of accessing the database is. We evaluated several technologies…

• NHibernate - May be very good, but it was overkill for what we were trying to do.
• LINQ to SQL - This brings C#'s LINQ (Language-Integrated Query) to SQL databases. You create database-aware classes and use LINQ to select from collections, which LINQ to SQL converts to database access. This is a good abstraction, but it relies on SQL Server; as we typically deploy to PostgreSQL, this didn't work. (We also couldn't get DBLinq, a database-agnostic implementation, to work.)
• ADO.NET - This is the tried-and-true database access methodology, released as part of the initial release of the .NET framework. The downside to this is that it encourages SQL in the code at the point of data retrieval; it does not provide a clean separation of data access from data processing.
• EF Code First - This didn't exist; it's also very SQL Server-centric. Not faulting Microsoft for that, especially since they release a free version now; but, as we deploy on Linux, until they release a Linux version, SQL Server is not an option.

With our PHP applications, we had written a database service that read queries from XML files. Then, queries were accessed by name, with parameters passed via arrays. The one thing that ADO.NET has that was useful was the fact that it is based on interfaces. This means that if we wrote something that exposed, manipulated, and depended on IDataConnection (instead of SqlConnection, the SQL Server implementation of that interface), we could support any implementation of database. The SqlDataReader implements IDataReader as well. Our solution was becoming apparent.

Over time, we developed what is now the Database Abstraction project hosted on CodePlex (UPDATE: migrated project to GitHub). On Thursday, we released the first public release (although the DLLs are in the repository, and are usually current at every commit). If you are looking for a way to separate your data access from the rest of your code, or want a solution that's database-agnostic, check it out. It supports SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and ODBC connections *, using the data provider name to derive the proper connection to implement. There is also a Mock implementation to support unit tests; this mock can provide data, providing a useful way to test methods. Finally, there is a membership and role provider based on Database Abstraction; simply configure the connection string, create the database tables, and away you go! **

A pre-release version is already in production use in our PrayerTracker application, and others are being built around it. If this sounds like something that could help your project, certainly feel free to check it out!

* Oracle is omitted from this list, as their DLL had redistribution restrictions; this meant that the source code repository, upon check-out, would have build errors. There may be an Oracle implementation in the future (it would be trivial), but there is not one now.

** The membership and role providers are untested; they will be tested and tweaked by version 0.9.