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Finally, a promising open source ASP.NET Wiki Engine

posted @ Monday, July 23, 2007 2:32 PM

It may just be me, but over the past couple years I've tried several times to find a good open source Wiki implementation in ASP.NET.  I've never found anything that looked like a polished product, let alone one that seemed to be actively developed. 

Instead, I have been using - and really enjoying - the Ruby on Rails wiki Instiki for the most part.  The only problem with Instiki is that I do 95% ASP.NET development, and I run Windows.  This is really my problem, not Instiki's!  While it's pretty easy to run Instiki as a windows service, it is not easy to set it up to be secure and easily accessible by remote users.  It runs on port 2500 by default on the Ruby WEBrick web Server.  Not to mention you have to have Ruby installed, as well as SQL ADO for Ruby, if you want to use SQL Server.   There may be better ways to configure and deploy, but the additional effort has never seemed worth it. 

I always longed for an ASP.NET wiki that I could just drop into a virtual directory alongside all my other projects.  Finally, I stumbled onto ScrewTurn Wiki via Derik Whittaker.  It seems like this has been around for some time, but must have terrible search engine results, because I still can't easily find it via google.  Anyway, it's in version 2.0 at this point, and looks like it has everything I need and more. 

My only complaint so far is that I have to learn a  new Wiki Markup syntax (if anything is just crying out to be standardized...)  I really liked using Instiki's Textile markup.  Of course, I could write a Provider to handle Textile markup for ScrewTurn Wiki, but who do you think I am?  Ayende?!?

Tut-tut!  What's this?  An open source .NET Textile Formatter...  hmm, maybe I can pull an Ayende with very little of my own effort!  Off to check this out...