What Is Kaliko and What Open Source .NET Tools Does It Offer?

Kaliko is the home of three free, open source projects for .NET and ASP.NET developers: Kaliko CMS (a content management system for ASP.NET MVC and WebForms), Smart Include (a library for bundling, minifying and compressing CSS/JavaScript to speed up page loads), and the .NET Image Library (image resizing, cropping, thumbnails and filters). If you are building or extending an ASP.NET site, managing front-end assets, or handling images in .NET code, one of these projects likely matches your task. All three are described as free and open source on the project site.

Kaliko CMS: managed content for ASP.NET sites

Kaliko CMS is a content management system built for the ASP.NET platform. According to the project site, it is intended to:

• Enable rapid development on a dynamic framework
• Offer great extensibility
• Support both ASP.NET WebForms and MVC
• Work with a wide range of databases

The practical use case is straightforward: you have an ASP.NET application and want editors to manage page content without a developer shipping code for every text change. The site positions it both for creating a new website and for extending an existing web application with managed content — so it is not limited to greenfield projects.

Choose it when your stack is already ASP.NET (MVC or WebForms) and you want an open source CMS that fits that platform rather than a separate CMS you would have to integrate around.

Smart Include: faster page loads through asset bundling

Smart Include is an open source .NET library aimed at speeding up page loading. Its documented capabilities:

• Minify and compress CSS and JavaScript
• Bundle CSS and JavaScript together
• Smart client caching
• Dynamic bundling
• Keep CSS/JavaScript readable on the server
• Toggle debug mode

Minification is handled by the Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor, a tried-and-tested tool. The site notes the library is useful with ASP.NET WebForms.

The "keep readable on server" point matters in practice: you author normal, commented CSS and JavaScript files, and the library produces the compressed, bundled output that browsers receive. Debug mode lets you switch back to readable assets while troubleshooting. Choose Smart Include when your problem is many small CSS/JS requests slowing pages down, and your project is WebForms-oriented.

.NET Image Library: image handling in safe code

The .NET Image Library is an open source .NET library for common image operations:

• Image filters
• Resizing and cropping
• Thumbnail creation
• Saving as JPG, GIF or PNG files or streams
• Opening images from streams or URLs

A distinguishing detail from the project site: it uses only safe code, which makes it possible to run on web hosts with medium trust. That is a real constraint for shared hosting environments where full-trust libraries fail. Choose this library when you need server-side thumbnails or resizing and your hosting restricts what code can run.

Choosing between the three

The three are independent — you can adopt one without the others. A typical combination is Kaliko CMS for content, Smart Include for the front-end assets, and the Image Library for uploaded media.

A note on the name

The site also carries legacy information: before focusing on open source .NET projects, "Kaliko Entertainment" was a team that developed mobile games (Brainteaser, Last in Line) for the Amiga DE / Amiga Anywhere platform in the early 2000s. That history is unrelated to the current .NET tools — if you encounter older references to Kaliko games, they describe a different era of the same name, not the CMS or libraries covered above.

To get started, visit the project pages linked from the site for each tool; the site presents all three as free and open source, with no pricing information listed.