Oxite or S#arp Architecture for new Asp.net CMS site

Question

I'd like to build a CMS site based on Asp.Net Mvc and I want to choose my starting point.

I have seen that there is a lot of interest in the new Microsoft Oxite project also if it seems to be pretty early to adopt it in a production project.
I've also looked at S#arp Architecture but it does not properly compare to Oxite as is just a starting point for general Asp.Net Mvc sites.

For me S#arp Architecture has some advantages over Oxite as is far less complex and it uses Nhibernate for the data access layer.
Oxite code uses Linq2Sql for it's DAL and has already a project in the solution that requires the DB version for VS2008.
Oxite seems to me more blog oriented than CMS oriented but I haven’t looked the code deeply.

Here are some of the choices that would point me to S#arp Ar. for starting.

• Simple clean architecture
• Nhibernate Dal
• Community supported

Oxite:

• Microsoft project
• Potential huge community
• Early stages but very good code quality
• Provider model that permits to easily switch the DAL

If anyone has looked at the code of these two projects please advice on your opinions.

Thanks

Answer 1

Oxite might be feature rich, but the code quality is very low.

I was very surprised when I checkout the code and found controller actions with 100+ lines of very unclean code, tagsoup views, no unit tests, etc.

The criticism has been well summed up in these blog posts:

http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/some-thoughts-on-oxite/

http://codebetter.com/blogs/karlseguin/archive/2008/12/15/oxite-oh-dear-lord-why.aspx

Answer 2

Oxite is well detailed already, entirely negatively.

I'll just add that I've been using S#arp architecture for several months and found it very maintainable and flexible. There's also a very solid, growing and active community of users around it.

It is very clean, and quite easily upgraded to Fluent NHibernate RC 1.0

Answer 3

I didn't get much of a response at my question about Oxite here at SO (found at Oxite: What are you going to do with it?), but it is really new so it'll take some time for people to warm up to it and fully check it out. The architecture of Oxite is really easy to get started with; that's its strongest suit.

I'd never heard of S#arp before I read your question so I'll definitely check it out.

Answer 4

As always, it depends on your needs. It sounds like you need something more CMS based. Oxite happens to have some CMS-like features, but it's not really a CMS. It might be in the future as it's a community project, but right now it isn't (all you can do is add content pages).

We're glad everyone seems to like Oxite overall, but it is pretty early. Not to deter anyone from using it in production, because we do. We run MIX Online on it, but totally understand if you're not comfortable with it. We need a stabilization period. At the same time we also need people running it so we can make it stable. Chicken and Egg I'd say. :)