Converting BlogEngine for SQL Server

One of the reasons I decided to use BlogEngine.Net, besides the fact that it's written using my favourite programming langague is that it can use SQL Server rather than xml. So today that's what I've been doing, and fortunately Al Nyvelt was kind enough to provide a video tutorial for using SQL providers with BlogEngine.

It looked really very easy but I ran into a few problems getting Visual Studio 2008 to use the ASP.NET configuration tool to recreate my Roles and Users. The normal system tray icons appeared but no browser window. So after a quick trip to the land of Google I found that simply by clicking the root of the site in Solution Explorer and then selecting "Browse with..." allows you to set the browser you want to use with the tool and though normally I'd use FireFox it doesn't render the admin tool as nicely as IE!

Ok that problem dealt with next was to create my user account. Somehow the ASP.NET config tool created my account but failed to add it to the correct role. So I deleted that one and set up another, tried logging in and only got the Extensions and Change Password admin menu items. Thinking this was weird I checked the spelling of my roles but nothing obvious there. I repeated this process a few times, creating an admin/admin account to log in with and then set my user account up from within BlogEngine.net and this time it stuck. 

Next for me is to monkey about with the theme, there are elements of some of the other themes that I really like that aren't present in Terafirma. Depending on how much painting needs doing tomorrow I might have a chance to do it then...