‘Redmond quietly fields its ASP.Net Community Starter Kit, a freely downloadable Weblog builder.

With Google buying Blogger creator Pyra Labs over the weekend, many are wondering when and if Microsoft will take a similar plunge into the Weblog-tools world.

It will come as a surprise to many that, with little fanfare, Microsoft officially entered the blogging-tool space last week. At the VSLive! developer conference, Microsoft unveiled five new sample applications built on top of its ASP.Net scripting environment. One of these five — the ASP.Net Community Starter Kit — is a blog builder.

“You could use this (Kit) to build a Weblog,” confirms Microsoft developer division product manager Shawn Nandi.’ Microsoft Watch