UPDATE: I'm not moving to BlogEngine.net...I've spent a couple of days working through the code and to get the level of performance I want would take a significant amount of rework. The most serious issue is how BlogEngine loads in posts...it loads them all into memory at first page load and holds them there...great if you have 20 or so posts, but I have >800 with hundreds more comments...this is a significant issue IMHO! It's an elegant little engine but it just doesn't scale at a pretty fundamental level. I'm now a proud member of Phil's SubText Project, vNext...
I've done this in a few ways in the past, ranging from custom XML templates with XSLT / Regular Expressions to screen scraping - this is just the simplest and cleanest way I've seen to do this (also a very nice example of using the RenderControl method...). Actually, be sure to check out the rest of the content on this blog, some really handy stuff on there...
Just noticed this article by Paul Wilson from reading this post on his V1.x MasterPages Stuff. Nice, compact article on the timing of Page events in ASP.NET...very handy!