Oh, Oxite, we love this open source .NET blog software

Adam Kinney — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:19:00 GMT

Oxite, an open source, standards compliant, extensible CMS was "hard-launched" today, much to the delight and excitement of quite a few people. We "soft-launched" it Friday night but you probably didn't hear about it.

When the time came to relaunch MIX Online the new team met with the Channel 9 dev team and a new opportunity was born. The MIX team had a few themes in mind; Content, Bits, Design and Standards. (For the full story check out Nishant Kothary's Web Design from the Gut article on the design process from the beginning).

Oxite, an ASP.NET MVC based blog (6:48)

The Channel 9 dev team saw an opportunity to take all of what they've learned from building sites like Channel 9, Ch8, 10 and TechNet Edge and mix it with the goodness that is ASP.NET MVC.

You can hear more about the dev team's thoughts from Erik and Nathan in this interview. (I apologize for the lack of "So" filter and my sleepiness in this video. I had little sleep the night before. I know, I know, no excuses...)

Not quite a few people are excited about this sample, which is what it is. Its not a product, but is a working sample/starter kit that you can use as a blog like the MIX Online site or you can use to learn ASP.NET MVC.

Here's a few of the posts on Oxite today:

MIX Online - Web Design from the Gut
Mary-Jo Foley - Microsoft develops open-source content-management system
Ed Bott - Microsoft takes dead aim at Wordpress...
Joe Wilcox - Oxite: Just MIX and Serve
Jeff Sandquist - Supporting Web Standards With Microsoft

In Jeff's post he mentions this came from a side project that Duncan and I had been working back when I was on the team. This is true in some sense, we did have our own blog software called Oxite with highly configurable XHTML output. I'm actually still running it today with this post.

But, I believe that the Channel 9 dev team has mainly inherited the name along with the spirit of a simple easy to configure blog.

KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid...or in this case Smartie.

I've been tracking the project as the guys have been working on it and I'm excited to crack it open and replace my correct blog with it. Now that we all have a single code-base and format we agree on, I'm looking forward to what comes next.

I want to start adding next release features and cool components. Now I just need to join the Oxite CodePlex project and get the import code from Duncan :)

Enter The Continuum Show

Adam Kinney — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 18:06:00 GMT

The Continuum Show has begun!

In this new show on Channel 9, we'll be exploring the world of the Microsoft Client Continuum. The Continuum refers to the array of UI technologies available form Microsoft including WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, IE8,Windows 7, Surface and more.

We'll be showing new features, patterns and practices from experts and samples of awesome applications. There's a lot of stories that don't always make it out to everyone and I'm excited to be presenting those stories with the new show.

Episode 0 - Hello World and Episode 1 - MVC Preview with Phil Haack have already been published and I have a few more in stock waiting to be published. Some of the episodes already filmed include the NBC Olympics site, Kaxaml and a Facebook application built with ASP.NET and Silverlight.

If you have any suggestions for topics or applications you would like to see covered leave a comment.

To stay tuned to the Continuum Show you can follow along on Twitter, join the room on FriendFeed or become a fan on Facebook.

Now back to the editing room...

Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'mvc'

Oh, Oxite, we love this open source .NET blog software

Enter The Continuum Show