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Open Source Projects I Like

While I am willing to buy and use software components that help me the job done, I also am fine with using some open source .Net stuff if it works well enough.

I use some open source .Net web applications. I prefer to use and support the .Net projects when I can, versus that other web language that many people use... This is a listing of some of those, in no particular order.

Roadkill Wiki

Roadkill Wiki is a modern looking .Net based wiki app. It is what this site is based on. It's a fairly new project, which means on the good side that it uses up to date .Net (although it does use MVC...), Lucene.Net and modern stuff like Bootstrap. I liked it because it's pretty simple to install and use, and gives me what I need for this, or other wiki type installations I may build. It caches content well, which makes it pretty responsive.

The other side of it being new is that it doesn't have a huge amount of functionality yet, and is a little lacking in maturity in some areas. But it looks like at this point it is built on a solid foundation, so it should be able to improve and have a long life.

Bugtracker.Net

Bugtracker.Net is an open source ASP.Net based bug/change request tracker. It's been around a long time, it isn't fancy or pretty, but it gave me a way to do some simple bug/enhancement tracking in a way that I could expose to clients easily.

I sometimes use a more modern, paid system now, but still have some clients on my Bugtracker site. No reason to move off it yet!

It doesn't look like the author has done any code updates in quite a while, but he is still answering questions on his support forum.

Umbraco CMS

Umbraco is an open source ASP.Net based Content Management System (CMS). There are many, many CMS applications to choose from, and I continue to believe that the best ones are not free. But Umbraco is pretty cool.

Umbraco has been through quite a few big changes, so if you haven't seen it lately, you might ought to look again. It is very, very flexible, can use virtually any kind of HTML template, can support you if you prefer MVC, or if you prefer Web Forms. You can extend it to do anything with your .Net skills.

Because of this flexibility, it really isn't a user-ready CMS right out of the box. Although you can download some prefab templates to get started. But in general, you really need to understand how to create "document types" and template pages to know how to set up a site. So it really is a developer's CMS. Once you have it going though, you can turn it over to non-technical users to manage content.