Today is a sunny (even if damn cold) day in Milano so while I was coming to work I decided I wanted write something good about Oxite, the CMS built by the MIX Online team.

The point I want to make is: Oxite is the best example to show how bad WebForms are when it comes to rendering standard compliant HTML.

There has been a lot of  negative talking about Oxite: it’s not working out-of-the-box, it’s not such a good example of how to implement something with the ASP.NET MVC framework, people looking at it as state-of-the-art  will learn bad practices, and so on.

But its 200 lines long controller actions and its ‘99 spaghetti style views state a great point: you can reuse your skills from “Classic” ASP.NET webforms (and probably even some code) and just by using the the ASP.NET MVC framework you can get a clean and standard HTML. And for public facing websites and web applications this is incredibly important.

Sure, the at the moment Oxite is not exploiting all the possibilities that framework gives you to allow you to build a maintainable, testable web application, but hopefully it will get better now that Rob Conery started to help them refactoring to a best practice application, hopefully by the time ASP.NET MVC RTMs before MIX 09 it will be a good example of MVC.