The first drop of the Starter Site for Commerce Server 2006 is now available immediately. If you have already registered, simply hit http://connect.microsoft.com/, sign in with your Passport, and it will be avalable as part of the downloads for CS2006. Be sure to also get the new installation guide as well as that has been updated.

If you have not registered and gotten the Beta yet, feel free to do so at http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/ and follow the instructions there.

This is the first drop of a work that is still in progress. But, a functional catalog browse through checkout path is now there. The Starter Site has to come after the core product given that we need the core product in a stable state to build a site on top of it. This release should be treated as an end-to-end API example. It is not feature complete, the Visual Studio 2005 designer experience and control gallery is not there, and we have a lot of code refinements and testing still to go. But to give you a good sample to play with, it is ready for action. And for the record, this IS NOT supported in production environments – even for TAP customers. All of that will come in due time.

Hope you enjoy it and Happy Friday!