Last weekend, the Channel 9 guys released an open source blog engine called Oxite, built using ASP.NET MVC. This went by fairly unnoticed (for me at least), until Rob Conery shared his thoughts about it over on his blog earlier today. Not long after his post, Twitter was buzzing with opinions - here are what some people have had to say about Oxite so far:

“wow, the Oxite codebase is an example of the MVC anti-pattern. WOW” - @DerikWhittaker

“Oxite: No DI/IoC, not at all SOLID, i.e. typical MS sample software :)” – @mikehadlow

“Oxite will be used by developers first, and will introduce initiates to all kinds of irresponsible design” - @bellware

“Oh dear, look at Site.Master in Oxite.” - @chadmyers

“Oxide fails as both an example and as an application. It's damaging for us guys trying to push the methodologies that mvc aids” - @chriscanal

You can catch up on the entire discussion using this Twitter search query. Erik Porter (@HumanCompiler) is one of the guys behind Oxite and has been doing his best to defend it – I almost feel bad for the guy :)

I think what worries everyone the most is that since this is something released by people who work for Microsoft, it will get a lot more attention than it would merit on its own. Through its connection to Microsoft it automatically gains credibility, and novice developers will falsely look at Oxite as some kind of ‘Microsoft-approved’ guidance on how to build (ASP.NET MVC) applications. Given the current state of the codebase, these developers will be led astray, and potentially pick up bad practices and anti-patterns.

It shall certainly be interesting to see how all the feedback will affect the future development of Oxite.