Woohoo!  Finally found out what the problem was with BlogEngine comments.  It turns out the problem was an element in the parent web.config called xhtmlConformance.  Here's an article about it in Scott Guthrie's blog:

Gotcha: Don't use <xhtmlConformance mode="Legacy"/> with ASP.NET AJAX

I had figured it wasn't really a problem with BlogEngine, and was probably some sort of configuration issue, for this simple reason: the site was identical (except for content differences) on my server, vs. my local machine.  In my case, the legacy switch had been turned on in the web.config of the parent web... which is why I had trouble tracking this down.  Not knowing about the legacy switch didn't help the situation.

Thank you Scott Guthrie!

Prior to upgrading BlogEngine I had written (actually borrowed/rewritten) a fairly ugly user control to show a daily quotation.  Now that BE 1.4.5 is here, the new widget framework looks pretty nifty.  So I took the LinkList widget and massaged it into something I could use to store and display daily quotes.

My original quotes setup only shows one quote on any given day and uses a datestamp to keep track of this.  I've attached my first pass at a quotation widget below.  This widget picks a quote at random each time the page loads.  However when you edit you will see a date field... eventually I want to make a daily quote as with my original (or perhaps you can choose to display random quotes or to rotate at daily intervals, or even time intervals).  So the date field is there for future use.

The quote is displayed in a div styled with the selector "quotation".  The author/source is displayed in a 2nd div with the style selector "quotation_author".  So you can update your theme stylesheet to modify the appearance of these.

Enjoy!

Quotations.rar (4.21 kb)

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3/13/2009:  There is an update to the quotations widget.

Last night at my .NET user group meeting the topic was WCF (Windows Communication Foundation); our speaker was a Microsoft evangelist from Hartford (his blog).  WCF is Microsoft’s next evolution beyond webservices; my take-aways from the presentation:

• separation of concerns; focus on the business logic and not the plumbing
• configuration magic (also seen as the rough edge of the current version of WCF; MS is working on improving that piece for admins)
• unshackled from IIS
• Retarget your end point to JSON, RSS, you name it, with just a few lines (one line?) of code

Of course there’s a lot more to it than that… I plan on looking into it more when I can find the time.  If you like webservices I think you're going to love WCF.  .NET 3.5 SP1 is coming out sometime this summer, they’re going to be adding further enhancements to WCF in that release.