Hi all,
It has been way too long since I posted. I’ve been suffering from paralysis of analysis on what I am going to blog about. That and who has the time, there is just way too much going on to blog lately.
Anyway, I’ve been digging into Community Server lately. I didn’t realize what an awesome platform Community Server really is. A while back I got involved with the ASP.net 2.0 Commerce Starter Kit as well. I had started a fulfillment smart client application that I just had to stop working on due to time constraints. At that time I created a WSE 3.0 custom authentication module that authenticated web services against the membership provider.
What is really cool about these two disparate projects is that they both use ASP.net 2.0 membership. Now while ASP.net 2.0 membership allows users to use any membership provider, Microsoft ships the default SQL server implementation and schema out of the box. A lot of Microsoft developers use this. Now what that means is we have two applications that build off of the same member ID in the database. This seems really cool because it should be possible to link together the two projects and be able to track users to blog comments, forum posts, and have them buy something as well.
On top of all that, you can use CodeSmith and .netTiers to generate a custom application specific to your needs and add that into Community Server.
Creating this schema was a very important thing for Microsoft to do, and now all of these projects can integrate with much less effort. I see the potential for all kinds of open source projects in ASP.net land to use this as a way of simple integration.
Some cool stuff in ASP.net land…
Jon
