Oxite? MVC Best Practices?

Last week the team responsible for the MIXOnline site, released on Codeplex a new “Open Source” Blog Engine/CMS called Oxite.  One of its two main goals is stated as follows - “To provide a real-world sample written using ASP.NET MVC”.

Since the release of this sample application, there has been a lot of chatter in the twittersphere and blogosphere about this application.  The general consensus seems to be that, as a sample ASP.NET MVC application, it is a poor example. (See Karl Seguin’s blog and Scott Koon’s blog for more on the issues.)

I haven’t had a chance to do a code-review myself yet, but as an MVC newbie I might not notice anything wrong – and there’s the problem.  If this is being touted by a Microsoft Team as a “real-world sample written using ASP.NET MVC”, then surely it should use best practices for using this new (for ASP.NET developers) pattern.

Some have argued that the Oxite development team seem to be open about accepting contributions and working with the community to fix the many problems, but while this is commendable, I am still of the opinion that this should never have been touted as a “real-world sample” of “ASP.NET MVC”.

I know this wasn’t written by the development team, but anything released from Microsoft carries the perception of a stamp of approval.  I hope that when the 1.0 RTW version of the ASP.NET MVC Framework is released that there will be some “Best Practices” examples included to help us MVC newbies in the right direction.