Oxite, Microsoft’s New Blogging Software, Released

It looks like Microsoft has put its foot into the blog market with the release of Oxite, a new open-source blogging infrastructure.

According to Microsoft, Oxite was designed to make many of the more difficult-to-manage functions of blogs, such as trackback, RSS, and comments, as simple as basic blog features.

Another unique aspect of Oxite is that it is written in ASP.Net MVC. ASP.Net MVC is Microsoft’s web-program development framework. This makes Oxite the first large-scale blogging software written in Microsoft’s MVC framework, meaning Oxite integrates into other Microsoft development platforms, such Visual Studio. Oxite also serves to display what can be done with such tools.

Since Oxite is licensed under the open source Microsoft Public License, the code is available on Microsoft’s CodePlex site. Microsoft also announced that the source code for Mix Online, an example of a site built with Oxite, will be made available online.

So what does this all mean? Is Oxite a viable alternative to other blogging platforms? If you are an average blog user, then no, Oxite is most likely not the right choice for you. Microsoft says that Oxite was not developed as a competitor to suites like blogger or wordpress. Instead, Oxite is geared towards professional developers. Although, given that it is an open source, community-driven project, we may one day see a release of Oxite made for public consumption.

So, if you are a professional developer looking for an alternative blog-development platform, Oxite may be worth a look, especially if you work heavily in visual Studio, which Oxite is closely linked to.  Juding by the Mix Online website, it looks like Oxite is capable of producing some very nice blogs.