Question

Any suggestions for good open source asp.net (C#) apps out there which meet as many of the following:?

1. Designed well and multi tiered
2. Clean & commented code
3. Good use of several design patterns
4. Web pages display properly in all common browsers
5. Produces valid html and has good use of css
6. Use of css themes. Prefer usage of css than tables
7. NOT dependent on third party components (grids, menus, trees, …etc)
8. Has good unit tests
9. Web pages are not simplistic and look professional
10. Uses newer technologies like MVC, LINQ.. (not important)
11. (Anything else that matters which I couldn’t think of right now)

Answer 1

I would have to agree with BlogEngine. It implements a ton of different abilities and common needs in asp.net as well as allowing it to be fully customizable and very easy to understand. It can work with XML or SQL (your choice) and has a huge community behind it.

As for your requests (bold means yes):

1. Designed well and multi tiered
2. Clean & commented code
3. Good use of several design patterns
4. Web pages display properly in all common browsers
5. Produces valid html and has good use of css
6. Use of css themes. Prefer usage of css than tables
7. NOT dependent on third party components (grids, menus, trees, …etc) – kind of, still uses some custom dlls
8. Has good unit tests – not sure
9. Web pages are not simplistic and look professional – yes, and there are TONS of free templates out there
10. Uses newer technologies like MVC, LINQ.. (not important) – not yet
11. (Anything else that matters which I couldn’t think of right now) – a ton more stuff like dynamic rss feeds, dynamic sitemaps, data references, etc.

There is also a bunch more great open source projects available here: http://www.asp.net/community/projects/

I know that dotNetNuke is pretty popular as well, and the Classified Program is pretty easy to use.