Keyvan Nayyeri

Older members of the .NET community who have been following open source news or active users of .NET blogging engines such as Community Server, Graffiti, Subtext, BlogEngine.NET and DasBlog, would know BlogML as one of the unique .NET open source projects that targeted a universal format for blogs and quickly applauded by the community leaders and members to be a built-in part of the famous .NET blog engines. BlogML was founded by Darren Neimke in mid-2005 as a GotDotNet project including an XML specification and a .NET API library and I joined the team in 2006 to take the main role in development and leadership.

We had three milestones in less than a year (0.9, 1.0 and 2.0) and the last version (2.0) could become a very stable and commonly used version of BlogML specification and .NET library that continued its growth for almost a year.

I felt the quick speed of BlogML development and defined a roadmap for the project to refine it as much as possible. One of the main flaws reported by users of the project was its documentation that convinced me to put it in the roadmap with more priority. But to be honest, it wasn’t (and still isn’t) possible for me to take care about everything around the project both as a developer and as a documenter because this latter task requires more effort and time, so I looked for new team members to assist me on this thread but had no luck! Unfortunately the beginning of my military service training in February 2007 put an obscure in the lifecycle of BlogML project and stopped me from focusing on the project for a long while. Moreover, nobody else joined me to handle the project and it smoothly went silent during the time.

Now it’s been over two years since the last release of the project and we even haven’t had a Beta or minor build while BlogML continued to be used by blog engines and bloggers here and there! In this while there were some circumstances where I tried to reactivate the project such as rebuilding the official site, restarting the development by some unit tests, building a new XML validator tool with WPF and a few other attempts that could not be continued in the long run!

To be honest, timing is my main problem to handle many tasks at the moment. My military service has eaten the best hours of my days and the remained hours had to be spent on more important tasks than open source (yes, doubtlessly there are many stuff more important than open source software!). Along the timing, lack of contribution from other developers and community members has been another big problem that can affect any open source project and it has been daring BlogML as well. It’s beyond the scope of this post but it looks like that those .NET community members who are interested in open source (that are actually a small percentage of the whole community) would like to work on some specific areas.

However, a short while ago Phil and Jon informed me about a known issue in BlogML 2.0 and I promised to resolve it for BlogML 2.5 but I had no certain schedule for the future of this project. Everyday I receive personal emails asking about some issues in BlogML usage and implementation or the future of the project (that could be addressed in a good documentation) and I never can answer them, so I decided to summarize some details about the project and share them here with you publicly hoping it can clarify some points and allow and encourage me to work more on the future of the project.

Unlike something that might come to your mind about the abandonment of the project, BlogML is not dead and will withstand in the future. I’m busy, so busy, but this doesn’t mean that I will neglect the project forever because it’s now big and old enough to require my care. Although I’ll get my heads off of the service next Saturday but I’ll have a more busy schedule for the next 2-3 consecutive months than what I had during the service. Hopefully dark clouds disappear by the end of the year to allow me drop a new build at the beginning of 2009. By the way, I may start developing the new specification and .NET library earlier and have a Beta release at the end of 2008.

As is listed in the roadmap, BlogML 2.5 targets .NET Framework 3.5 with a totally refreshed API and XML specification and a rich documentation is still perceived as an inherent element of it.