Commerce Server 2002 Showcases .NET

Microsoft has released the final beta of Commerce Server 2002, the latest version of the company’s server application for building and maintaining e-commerce sites. Although most improvements are incremental, the new edition is significant because it’s the first product in Microsoft’s .NET Enterprise Server line that uses the .NET Framework. In particular, developers can build Commerce Server sites on ASP.NET, a new technology for creating and running Web applications that offers significant advantages over Active Server Pages (ASP), and can use the Visual Studio .NET development tool to build these sites. However, the product still lacks integrated support for Passport and Microsoft’s other planned services for Web sites.

Commerce Server Overview

Introduced in 2000 as the successor to Site Server Commerce Edition 3.0, Commerce Server is Microsoft’s server application for designing, building, deploying, and maintaining e-commerce Web sites. Commerce Server extends the Internet Information Server (IIS) Web erver in Windows 2000 with specific capabilities that e-commerce sites need. It requires SQL Server to store and retrieve data.