A (Quick) Web Developer's View of Oxite

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With weather conditions being what they are here in Calgary, I decided to spend some time playing around with Oxite, a blog engine written using ASP.NET MVC.

Oxite is well suited for Web developers wanting understand out how to leverage some of the capabilities of ASP.NET MVC. However, it needs work. That stated, here's a quick view of what I like (and what I dislike) about Oxite:

What I Like About Oxite

  • Reference implementation supports XHTML and CSS
  • Built on ASP.NET MVC
  • Incorporates jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX (yet to be used extensively)
  • Background service infrastructure (i.e. trackbacks)
  • Pluggable architecture
  • Clean database schema

What I Dislike About Oxite

  • Many missing features - particularly in the UI
  • Very low code coverage (i.e. 13% in Oxite framework)
  • Code analysis reveals many rule violations
  • No service endpoints to build upon
  • No documentation in source code
  • Utilizes LINQ to SQL
  • Update: The reference implementation is messy and needs to be cleaned up.

It should be noted that this is the initial release of Oxite and one should assume that the code will tighten up a great deal over the coming months.

It's way too early to tell whether or not Oxite will become as popular as other .NET blogging engines like dasBlog. Time will tell. Nevertheless, I wouldn't take your eye off this project. It's already being used by our MIX site and I anticipate it won't be very long until you see it incorporated elsewhere.