Orchard is a free, open source, community-focused project aimed at delivering applications and reusable components on the ASP.NET platform.

Orchard will create shared components for building ASP.NET applications and extensions, and specific applications that leverage these components to meet the needs of end-users, designers, developers, and Web professionals. 

Orchard seeks to create partnerships with existing application authors to help them achieve their goals. Orchard is delivered as part of the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery under the Outercurve Foundation. It is licensed under a New BSD license, which is approved by the OSI.

Orchard provides:

• Individual .NET-based applications that appeal to end-users, designers, developers, and Web professionals
• A set of re-usable components that makes it easy to build such applications
• A vibrant community to help define these applications and extensions

the Orchard project is currently focused on delivering a .NET-based CMS application that will allow users to rapidly create content-driven Websites, and an extensibility framework that will allow developers and customizers to provide additional functionality through module extensions and themes.