The Community Starter Kit was a popular open source Community Site for .NET 1.1 (reference links on http://www.CodePlex.com/CASKDotNet).  There were numerous issues, particularly with Images not displaying if IIS wasn't configured correctly that plagued the community for years.   When .NET 2.0 beta was released I attempted to join a team, any team, that was involved with CSK so we could fix known issues and upgrade it to support .NET 2.0.   Maintaining the forum was a full-time job and we lost many developers through the frustrations of not being able to make it work out of the box - I wanted to see this change...

Efforts failed to create a team so I was forced to lonewolf it; I fixed known issues and upgraded it to .NET 2.0 (beta at the time).  When CodePlex opened up I created the Community Advanced Starter Kit; I added "Advanced" because "starter" can be misleading; I was lost coming out of the gate because it used many advanced features of ASP.NET 2.0 (such as HttpModule).  

Shortly after joing CodePlex CSharpEd joined the team and he did magic with the Admin styles (rewrote admin management), added RSS feed support and created an installation wizard (to name a few).    CSharpEd and I had different visions (of equal value) for the CSK so we came to a mutual agreement that we should have our own projects; CSharpEd has http://www.CodePlex.com/DotNetCommunities where I have http://www.CodePlex.com/CASKDotNet.  

With the Solution Development Management System (SDMS) on the front burner the CASK system (as of this writing) starts creeping towards the front burner because the SDMS requires a Web Interface; an interface that will be comprised of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.   The limitations with MOSS 2007, i.e., 2000 records per list, no support for transactions and an inability to handle complex structures, requires programming to an external database.  MOSS 2007 also comes with a price tag that is not compatible with an open source project.  It will be a "core requirement" that the SDMS takes advantage of SharePoint (for those that have it).  For those that don't I need to provide a means to use it without SharePoint - enter stage left CASK.

As I study SharePoint and learn of it's strengths and limitations I'm seeing similiarities between it and the CASK.   The goal now is to create an interface that can be shared by both CASK and MOSS 2007 to manage sites and lists.   The CASK Database will serve as a respository for those custom requirements that can't be handled by MOSS 2007 because of it's limitations.

Within this context, preparing CASK for release becomes a higher priority - it is moving towards the front burner...