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You’ve built your site with WebMatrix and now want to engage your customers in a conversation. The kind of thing provided by Disqus,  the comments platform that helps you build an active community from your website’s audience.

The Disqus Helper for WebMatrix provides an easy way to integrate Disqus on your WebMatrix site. With a few lines of code you’ll able to show Disqus threads in your pages and let your users interact through your site.

You’ve used Orchard to easily create your product site and now you want to add commerce features.

The Checkout by Amazon module contains several components that allow you to integrate checkout and shopping cart capabilities to your Orchard CMS Website. The module works with any content type that has a Title, Price, Image, Description and SKU field.

Integrating the Checkout by Amazon module into your site requires three simple steps.

1. Create an account on Amazon’s Seller Central website. Optionally, create an Associate Id to upsell other Amazon items.
2. Install and configure the Checkout by Amazon Module in Orchard.
3. Add the Checkout by Amazon content part to any existing Content Type that represents your products. Optionally, add the Shopping Cart Widget to your pages.

You have a great set of products and now a beautiful commerce site drawing significant traffic. How will you let your interested customers make purchases in an easy, familiar, and trusted manner?

As demonstrated by Drew Robbins in today’s MIX 11 keynote, the Amazon Checkout Helper for WebMatrix makes it simple to integrate features such a Checkout by Amazon, Shopping carts, 1-Click, and Flexible Payment Services in your site. For example, with just a few lines of code you can use a shopping cart widget that provides the same features you see on the Amazon.com Website, and at the same time benefit from the security and confidentiality offered by Amazon and Microsoft.

Prism is intended for software developers building WPF or Silverlight applications that typically feature multiple screens, rich user interaction and data visualization, and that embody significant presentation and business logic.

Prism helps you to design and build flexible and maintainable WPF and Silverlight applications by using design patterns that support important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling.

This guide will show you how to use Prism to implement the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern in your applications, and how to use it along with commands and interaction requests to encapsulate application logic and make it testable.

For related guidance, lessons learned while developing Prism, and applications built using Prism, see our Prism posts.

During the PDC 10 keynote today Don Box showed how to quickly code up an application (“Rafiki”) that takes advantage of new Windows Azure Platform services.

Rafiki helps conference attendees find and connect with other attendees so they can network and discuss similar interest. If you’re here at the PDC event in Redmond and you’re an F# fan, chances are you can find someone else who also loves F#.

The application is a simple ASP.NET MVC application that runs in Azure and uses a SQL Azure database, and takes advantage of ACS for authentication, AppFabric Service Bus for on-premise services connectivity, newly available caching in Azure AppFabric and SQL Azure Reporting Services.

D’oh! While you spent a few days thinking about whether to attend PDC 10  or not, the decision was made for you: it quickly sold out. Will you have to wait until your colleagues return or the content is made available for download for you to experience the event? No – you can watch it live, online, in HD.

Using technology such as Smooth Streaming, Silverlight, IIS Transform Manager, Azure CDN, and SharePoint, a whole host of partners came together to deliver an awesome experience for viewers.

Whether you are delivering large events, or simple video training materials for your staff, check out the platform tools Microsoft is creating to support delivery of digital content. Our developers love working with them, and we suspect you will too.

You’ve just signed a big partnership and expect traffic to your site to increase. Oh-oh, what if your site can’t handle the load? Autocosmos.com is a web portal that allows users from eight Latin-American countries find the best car deals, offer cars for sale, and find quality car insurance, among other services. Following a strategic regional alliance with Yahoo! that made Autocosmos.com its official car site for some Hispanic audiences, the company needed to prepare its news platform to be able to receive a big increase in its site visitors, and successfully respond to a massive number of requests.

Autocosmos.com chose Windows Azure as its scalable cloud platform to handle peak loads. The news solution that originally ran off SQL Server was moved SQL Azure, and the portal was redesigned to use ASP.NET MVC. Thanks to the work done on the platform, Autocosmos.com can now easily handle peaks of thousands of active users per second without having to invest in a huge infrastructure: they just increase Azure Web Roles when hitting those peaks, and quickly decrease them when not needed.

The Fabrikam Shipping demo shown at TechEd 2010 has been updated to showcase a cloud-based subscription model.  As announced by Vittorio, “FabrikamShipping SaaS is a complete subscription based solution running on the Windows Azure platform and publicly available thru www.fabrikamshipping.com. It offers a web-based customer onboarding UI, which anybody can use for creating test subscriptions and obtain their very own application instance, dynamically provisioned by a simple but powerful provisioning engine. Thanks to our partnership with our friends evangelists at PayPal, it even demonstrates how to integrate payments and billing via an external provider!”

Visual Studio installed? Check. Silverlight knowledge? Check. Great idea for mobile app? Check. Copious amounts of free time to learn a different OS or programming language? Um, no.

Now that’s no longer a hurdle you have to jump. Use your existing tools and knowledge to build great applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform.

The easiest way to get started is to download the Windows Phone 7 Training Kit for Developers, where you’ll find a set of hands-on labs and videos for both Silverlight and XNA development.

It’s time to start a new Web client application. Do you find yourself searching for a past project that had your favorite architecture and patterns to use as a starting point?

Stop searching, and start using, the Web Client Software Factory. By using the software factory, architects and developers can focus their efforts on business opportunities and creating Web client applications that effectively address the needs of their organizations.

The software factory contains a collection of reusable components and libraries, Visual Studio 2010 solution templates, wizards, extensions, how-to topics, automated tests, extensive architecture documentation, patterns, and a reference implementation.