The Big Bad Blog

The Big Bad Blog is a tutorial series that could be presented as a workshop that demonstrates how to take a simple blog website with articles in markdown on disk, and make it into a large CMS. We've got a faux background story to set the scene and explain each step as the demo evolves

How this got started...

Our friend Arthur The Author wrote a simple blog engine with C# and ASP.NET Core Razor Pages that he was using to write some notes and publish with the Bootstrap CSS framework. This resulted in a simple blog engine that looked ok for him and his friends to reference. He could post new messages using markdown files that he wrote into the Posts folder and the engine would automatically discover, index, and present that content.

Arthur started to enjoy writing, and wanted to do more. He wanted to share his blog with friends Annie, Chris, and Tyler. He hoped they would start writing on his blog but the engine was getting a little more complicated. He wanted to add security controls, thumbnail management, comments, and so much more.

This workshop is our walkthrough of helping Arthur to take his simple blog engine and lift it up using .NET Aspire, .NET 8, GitHub, and Azure to make it into a publishing platform that he and his friends could use to share their stories with the internet.