At Microsofts VSLive conference in San Francisco last week, the company released betas of five packaged Web applications written for ASP.Net. Each is free to download and can be modified as desired. The applications will go gold later this year.
The five applications are a Web-based community site, a time-tracking application, a generic database reporting application, a Web storefront and a Web portal. The community site (see screen, below) is the most complex offering and provides user management, a discussion area, an event listing, a photo gallery, content aggregation, content ratings and voting. The reporting application supports master/detail reports, charting, sorting, running totals and printing. The storefront has the usual product catalog (plus photos and reviews), user account management and shopping cart. It also offers a cross-sell feature that shows other items previous purchasers bought and a Web service feature for ordering via SOAP. The templates are at www.asp.net.