Microsoft is clearly making an attempt at promoting opensource applications that use their tools and run on their platform, CommunityServer, DotNetNuke, and the starter kits are clear examples of this. I stumbled on the ASP.net 2.0 commerce starter kit last night and have to say it’s pretty darn nice. It’s the work of http://www.wekeroad.com and is just in it’s infancy compared to some of the other applications out there. One of the great features of this application is that it’s been backed by Microsoft and PayPal and works with PayPal Pro right out of the gate. For the past 10 years I’ve a great deal of working with e-commerce and in fact wrote my own shopping cart application 10 years ago in Perl and MySQL and can attest to the great joy and pain associated with such a task. Back in 99 when appliedi.net was founded, it was founded to cater to e-commerce based sites and continues to do this today with over 80% of it’s clients being ecommerce based sites. I can honestly say that a decent opensource (read free) ASP.net based shopping cart does not exist, there are a couple outstanding ASP.net based commercial apps (BVcommerce and Storefront) but many clients are put off by these applications because of their cost.
