A lot of people have heard of DotNetNuke, SubSonic, and some of the other big name .NET open source projects, but I want to talk about a few products that I have used that I think are worth discussing. I’m a big fan of user-friendly open-source, which all of these applications are (DotNetNuke fails in this regard), so my list will reflect that.

ScrewTurn Wiki

ScrewTurn is a piece of software that I’ve used on a couple of different DiscountASP.NET deployments. It has all of the basic features of a Wiki engine, but what I really like about ScrewTurn Wiki is the ease of deployment.

Cool Features:

• Doesn’t require a database, but does include an optional DB provider.
• Takes only a few minutes to deploy.
• Allows collaborative editing and has a wealthy number of administration features.
• Requires no server/database tweaking.
• Rapid response times.

Drawbacks:

• Uses a ton of service handlers to serve up pages; ScrewTurn wiki relies pretty heavily upon session-based data and I’ve had experiences where this has decimated my PageRank scores since Google ends up indexing a ton of .ashx pages (service handler extension) with compressed session hash-code stuffed in the URL, so this can really decimate your PageRank. ScrewTurn’s main page has a PageRank of 5, however, so perhaps they’ve made some changes since I last used it to improve its search engine optimization.
• I’ve had one of my wiki pages hacked and defaced before with strict security settings applied; I’m not sure how they did it, but there were some definite security problems with ScrewTurn.

The Verdict: ScrewTurn is a great tool for creating general documentation and it’s a really straight forward content management system for “horizontal” websites, meaning websites that publish content in no particular order. I do not recommend ScrewTurn for mission-critical applications, given some of the problems i mentioned.

BlogEngine.NET Blogging Platform

I’m running two different instances of BlogEngine.NET currently; one up at the AjaxNinja lab and another on my new project, which I may mention on AjaxNinja at some point in the future. BlogEngine.NET is another great open-source project which is very easy to deploy.

Cool Features:

• Doesn’t require a database, but does include an optional DB provider.
• Takes only a few minutes to deploy.
• Responds very quickly; handles traffic waves very well.
• Has a great project leader, Mads Kristensen.
• Project is developing quickly and has been met with a lot of enthusiasm from the .NET community.
• Supports multiple authors.
• Has native support for using FeedBurner as an alternate RSS/Feed source.
• It is incredibly easy to modify themes for BlogEngine.NET. It’s much easier than WordPress by contrast.

DrawBacks:

• BlogEngine.NET is still a young project; it has some kinks.
• BlogEngine.NET is a new entrant to the arena of blogging platforms; it’s missing a lot of the functionality that seasoned bloggers expect from established open source blogging engines like WordPress and Movable Type.
• Few published extensions.
• Limited number of available themes. It is incredibly easy to make your own themes, however.
• For some reason, BlogEngine.NET’s editor does not cooperate with FireFox’s built-in spell checker, so I have to manually spell check all of my published works.

The Verdict: BlogEngine.NET is a great blogging platform, and it’s only going to get better as the project progresses and more rich functionality is added by both the development team and contributors. I’ve got a number of my own extensions that I’m going to be writing (time permitting) in the near future, and I’ll make those public to the community.

I’d highly recommend using BlogEngine.NET if you need a lightweight, simple blogging platform; if you need a complicated, multi-blog community, you’d be better off using a proprietary product like Community Server 2007.

DotNetKicks Community-Driven News Platform

Alright, I have to admit, I have not yet deployed DotNetKicks to a live server. I plan on using it for my other project that I kept mentioning, but the time is simply not right to deploy it yet. I’ve been a big fan of the actual DotNetKicks community for a few months now, and it is hands down the best place to get the latest news regarding .NET-based technology.

Cool Features:

• DotNetKicks may be one of the strongest ASP.NET open-source projects to date. It helps when your primary user base happens to be .NET developers and enthusiasts.
• DotNetKicks is rich with a lot of features found on popular social news sites like Digg, such as the “kick spy,” “who’s online now,”and my favorite innovation, the “kick zeitgeist.”
• DNK utilizes SubSonic in order to build a reliable and sturdy data access layer.
• DNK incorporates a revenue sharing system with its contributors, which in my opinion helps create a stronger sense of “user ownership” in the community and provides a strong incentive to contribute.

Drawbacks:

• I’ve had some bad experiences with large-scale systems on my DiscountASP.NET shared hosting accounts lately; I’ve been told by the DNK developers that this won’t be an issue with DotNetKicks, but I’m a tad bit skeptical.
• These guys really need to roll all of their SQL commands into a single batch file; You have to execute 7-8 SQL scripts in a particular order to install the database properly.

The Verdict: I will be stoked once I deploy DotNetKicks to my other project; I love being a user of the actual DotNetKicks community, and managing my own little niche community sounds like it can be a lot of fun.

A quick drive by on what Scott Guthrie had to say regarding the announcement to open up .NET 3.5’s source code to the public:

One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them.

Today I’m excited to announce that we’ll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.

We’ll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). We’ll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

You’ll be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally). We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.

ReadWriteWeb has some coverage of the announcement too, although it’s abundantly clear from the post that RWW doesn’t understand .NET very well, for instance:

It’s hard to say what the incentive was for this move, it could be that .NET adoption in the developer community has been so small that a drastic step was needed or this could be a strategy to prepare for a big push of SilverLight, Microsoft’s new runtime for Rich Internet Applications. The .NET framework is also at the center of Vista, which so far no one has wanted to use at length.

.NET adoption from the developer community has been so small? I guess that’s why C# has increased from a 25.1% to a 34.9% share of the total developer community in Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

And as Robert Scoble pointed out in the comments:

It is absolutely false to say that .NET is at the center of Vista. Absolutely NOT true. There isn’t a line of .NET code in the core OS.

Basically the writer for RWW who covers Microsoft needs to be moved to another column. Period.

As for Mr. Scoble, rather than applaud Microsoft for putting its foot in the open source door he rips them a new one for not going far enough. Someone’s been reading a lot of Slashdot.

My thoughts

I frankly do not understand the incentive behind this move and it seems like something that only the most senor of .NET developers will find useful.

Do I need to see the source code for System.IO in order to determine the best practices? I sure as hell hope not, because if that’s the case then what have I been doing with my .NET applications since 2003?

Keep in mind this is what I think at a mere first glance; I’m sure some of the other .NET community members outside of Microsoft will provide some valuable insight into the implications of this release for our community.