I read Al Nyveldt’s post that a BlogEngine.Net 1.5 Release Candidate is available and immediately thought to download it and try it. Since my blog is very low traffic and not critical, I had no concerns about trying out the new version.
I followed Al’s basic instructions for upgrading to 1.4.5 and backed up my entire blog before wiping it clean and copying over the new files. Then I simply copied back my App_Data folder and all was well …. except the theme.
I could not get any theme at all. Not the standard theme, not anything. If I appended the query string “?theme=Standard” then it was fine, but by itself nothing worked. I searched the discussions over at the BlogEngine.Net CodePlex site and found this discussion about my exact problem. It turns out that people hosting on IIS7 could need a different <system.webServer> section in their web.config file. I don’t honestly know what the actual fixed part is, but I used the section linked in the discussion and everything started working again.
So far it is about the same from the everyday experience, but the Windows Live Writer tag support is nice. Just to be safe, I went to the “Edit blog settings” section of WLW and clicked “Update Account Configuration” to make sure that the new version supported features were recognized by WLW.