Probably the best place to look for open source .NET projects is the Codeplex community, that since June 2006 has served thousands of different projects. Recently, the users of this website have come up with another interesting project – Oxite, a simple blog engine written using ASP.NET MVC, and designed with the following goals:

1. To provide a sample of ‘core blog functionality’ in a reusable fashion, because, despite the fact that the blogs are simple and well understood by many developers, the set of basic functions that a blog needs to implement (trackbacks, rss, comments, etc.) are fairly complex.

2. To provide a real-world sample written using ASP.NET MVC.

Regardless, this project has become even more than just an ASP.NET MVC demonstration. Oxite provides you with a foundation for pingbacks, trackbacks, anonymous or authenticated commenting (with optional moderation), gravatar support, RSS feeds at any page level, support for MetaWebLog API (think Windows Live Writer integration made easy), web admin panel, support for Open Search format allowing users to search your site using their browser’s search box. Enough reasons to give it a try. Maybe even this website should consider a switch.