Orchard is a full CMS not just a blog engine, but as a blog engine the 1.1 release is growing on me. It has come a long way since the betas, and proably has even further to go. But I can see it growing up to be like WordPress. I tried a few things out, and I'll be keeping it.

After trying light and dark themes I think that one with a white background is best for readability and looking businesslike. I have finally found a theme that I like - it's called The Other Side . It's in the Orchard gallery here, and source is on github. I already feel confident to make minor hacks to the content of it, so I'll see about putting my version on a fork. This is a key feature that I wanted from a blog engine - that I as a C# coder can hack at it and learn more ASP MVC in the process.

So far, I have hacked in this syntax highlighter for the code samples.  So now code can look like this:

UnityContainer container = new UnityContainer();
if (needsRegistration)
{
    container.RegisterType<IJellybeanDispenser,VanillaJellybeanDispenser>();
}
var sweetShop = container.Resolve<SweetShop>();

Hm, it looks like that needs wrapping, or column widening, or a smaller font, or all of that. I'll try to fix that in a few days.

Update on May 28th: I have fixed the source layout a bit. I prefer it to spill over to the right than to truncate. However this means that it needs to be further down the page, below the widegts on the right.