With the release of Commerce Server 10, we have substantially shifted our development model to leverage the CodePlex community. And it’s significant enough both now and in our future plans that we wanted to talk a bit more about this.

Philosophically, we view Commerce Server as a server core (that shouldn’t change as often) and then everything else (which can be improved very frequently). Anything that falls into the “everything else” category should also belong in the community source world so that:

  • We can curate and assure quality
  • Every customer, partner, or enthusiast can contribute
  • Releases can be done in real-time and not be tied to the server core, for which there are obviously a lot more things that need to get done when we make changes

To that end, we have provided the following projects:

  • Commerce Server Tools @ http://cstools.codeplex.com/ - Our library of historical tools targeted mainly at IT professionals for systems administration and troubleshooting.
  • Commerce Server CodeGen @ http://cscodegen.codeplex.com/ - Our code generation framework for the Commerce Foudnation APIs to improve developer productivity.
  • Commerce Server Site Templates @ http://cstemplates.codeplex.com/ - Our out-of-box shopping experiences to get you up and running.
  • Nuget Packages @ http://nuget.org/profiles/csteam/ - Packages to help provision your deployments easily as well as grab our other community source projects via NuGet.

This is just the beginning. Commerce Server 10 has only been out for a few weeks but already we have the following enhancements in progress that will be debuting imminently:

  • Login and Authenticated Checkout for the Site Templates
  • SharePoint 2010 Site Template
  • SharePoint 2013 Site Template (coming a bit later post-general availability)

 And the framework is there for continued evolution to add more storefront features, integrate with payment/tax/shipping providers, etc., and more. And in the future, as we can decouple more things from the server core, look to see them in the community as well.

We are extremely excited about this change in the engineering model and the benefits it will bring to everyone – and we hope to see you there contributing as well!