14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has launched a new open source project designed to streamline access to applications and reusable components built on top of the ASP.NET platform.
Orchard 1.0 is not only open source, but also free and community-driven, the Redmond company explains.
According to the Project Mission page, Orchard 1.0 will be a destination designed for end-users, designers, developers, as well as Web professionals looking for resources they can leverage when building ASP.NET applications and extensions.
Obviously, a lot of focus will be placed on providing the Orchard 1.0 community with reusable shared components for third-party projects.
Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform explained what the new initiative is all about.
Orchard “provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard),” he stated.
“Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage).
“Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it.”
Orchard has been made available as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the Outercurve Foundation, Microsoft explained, adding that resources come with a New BSD open source license.
Users interested in getting insight into Orchard 1.0 can head over to the Documentation Wiki page.The site offers help on deploying and using Orchard, but also a wide range of additional resources related to the project.
As is the case for the rest of Orchard 1.0, developers, designers, etc. can also contribute to the documentation in addition to catalyzing the evolution of the project and other shared resources.