The Last Act
It’s no secret that Microsoft’s Orchard CMS was the engine behind NuGet (using the Gallery Project):
If you read Phil’s announcement, you can’t help but feel a sense of relief:
I’m very happy to be a part of this as my last act as a Microsoft employee. This is complete re-write of the gallery.
It really does seem like Phil stuck around just long enough to swap out Orchard. If you read Phil’s Twitter timeline (and others on the ASP team) – each of them are ecstatic about how fast the site has become (emphasis Phil’s):
And it’s WAY FASTER! I almost forgot to mention just how much faster the gallery is now than before.
Indeed, if you head over the to the Nuget site it is quite visibly faster. I used the site a few times and found it a bit confusing and maddeningly slow. But I always figured I caught it at a bad time.
But if you put the pieces together – we have a bit of a mystery. The ASP team is working on an Open Source CMS site and developed Gallery functionality for supporting exactly what Nuget needs. Then, the ASP team decides it’s time to change course (again, Phil):
Why a rewrite? We’ve learned a lot since we first launched, and our needs have evolved to the point where a rewrite made sense. The new implementation is a vanilla ASP.NET MVC 3 application and highly optimized to be a gallery with just the features we need.
The entire team is being rather careful not to paint a negative picture of Orchard. I think it’s very “team-like” of them, but at the same time the “it’s WAY FASTER” comments naturally lead one to ask: why wasn’t it fast before?
So What Happened?
I’ve been looking all night and this morning to see if anyone has publicly stated what the problems were, and how the Orchard team is going to address them (or if they even are). As opposed to what this looks like (me, being a dick) – I think this could be a really good learning experience.
After all, this is Open Source right? Gotta have the bads along with the goods 
.
Before I left Microsoft, I worked for a short time on what would become the Orchard team. We threw around some prototypes and ideas – but that was back when it was an eCommerce site. It has since morphed into a CMS and I am more than a bit curious as to why this move happened.
My opinion? I’ve never used Orchard so take this with a grain of salt: It’s too complicated from a UX point of view for a site like NuGet. I’ve deployed Big CMS’s before as a solution for clients and every single time we decided to move away. They’re great for getting off the ground – but after a while there’s jus too much friction.
But what about the Big Speed Jump part? As Phil says – it’s just a plain vanilla ASP.NET MVC site which (I believe) is using EF. Why the massive, visible speed difference?
I’d like to know – and I think others would like to know as well.
