Above is a screenshot of my blog via the “Oxite” open-source blog engine. Oxite was written by Microsoft to show off ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and the Unity Dependency Injection framework.

The Oxite codebase was abandoned about 2 years ago. Woefully incomplete. But still tempting to thine eyes.

I’ve been working on converting it to ASP.NET MVC 2, .NET 4, and replacing its use of Unity with .NET 4’s baked-in Managed Extensibility Framework.

It’s been quite a chore. And most of the chore has been since I did the initial conversions. I made the mistake of not giving the software a thorough test-run before I happily decided to start converting it. The conversion took about 10 hours spread across a couple days. When I was done, I came to find that it was buggy as hell, and doesn’t even have some very basic features like user registration. (It already has some wonderful features like MetaWebLog API support, trackback support, SiteMap serving, etc.)

But despite it’s inadequacies, I still prefer its codebase over DasBlog or BlogEngine.NET. It lacks the completeness that I’ve come to expect from small little Microsoft-released OSS packages. It has a big “cut-and-run” feel to it. But it has an architecture that I’m comfortable wading into. So I’d like to get user registration into it, and play around with the “theming” a bit before I go public with it, and then I will. At a whole new web address, too.

One of my major struggles has actually been getting my current blog’s content into it. I’ve managed to pull this off with a small, 100 lines-of-code executable, to parse Blogger’s export output and then dump it into Oxite using LINQ-to-SQL. This bit was actually a lot of fun, but one more hindrance on my way to my own personal blogging soap-box.

Since the biggest change with this project has been converting it to using MEF instead of Unity, I’m tentatively calling this codebase “OxyMefadon”. Because MEF is just that awesome.