For anybody involved in ASP.net based software development you may have noticed a suite of resources available on www.asp.net called starter kits.  I wonder though how many people have actually delved into these (I know many software companies who weren't aware of them)?

As the name suggests these starter kits are great starting point for a number of type of projects whether they are content managed websites, community websites, blogs, classified websites and so on.  We've used these as the basis for a number of developments - for example, a website that we recently developed for a property agency called Property Clever utilised the classifieds starter kit.  We did have to undertake quite a bit of customisation but I think we could reasonably estimate that the kit saved us in the region of a 3rd of the overall development timescale.  And I don't care to imagine how much time we've saved by utilising and customising the DotNetNuke CMS starter kit.

On other projects we have used components from these starter kits e.g. content manager web parts, e-commerce modules and so on.

Who says open source & Microsoft are mutually exclusive!