We are excited to announce support for Incarnate in the latest BlogEngine.NET release. In addition, we have made some improvements to the Incarnate service itself. Here’s the scoop:

BlogEngine.NET Support

With the release of BlogEngine.NET 1.6, Incarnate is now supported.  We worked with the team behind the project and they added the infrastructure in their engine to support other avatar providers in addition to Gravatar.  Now, they have a field that stores an avatar URL in association with each comment, which works for both their XML provider and their SQL provider.

While BlogEngine.NET doesn’t support Incarnate out of the box, adding it is a breeze.  It is a simple matter of replacing a single file (/User Controls/CommentView.ascx) and you are good to go.  It works across themes.  You can download the file here. If you’d like to see an example blog that uses Blog Engine.NET with Incarnate, see http://rhizohm.net/irhetoric. If you have questions or issues getting Incarnate working with your instance of BlogEngine.NET, let us know and we’ll be happy to help. And, hats off to the BlogEngine.NET team on a great release.

Incarnate Service Updates

We made two updates to the Incarnate service itself, which is hosted at http://incarnate.visitmix.com.  First, we’ve resolved cases in which the XBoxLive avatar provider returned 404s instead of the default XBoxLive avatar. You’ll no longer see an unattractive “not found” graphic. Second, for people consuming the service directly, the REST API is no longer case sensitive. 

We also made several updates to the Windows Azure infrastructure, including changing the actual instance used by Azure. Behind the scenes, we pointed the http://incarnate.visitmix.com url to a different Azure instance using cnames.