I know, I know, it’s a little late. I said Nov 1st and it’s now Nov 3rd. Here’s what happened – I was all on track to have it ready for the 1st, but then I got sick. I felt like a bowl of cold oatmeal, which is not very good. Kids … I’m tellin’ ya … they’re germ factories. I wound up spending the weekend in bed, resting. I could have down a drop on Friday or Saturday regardless, but it wasn’t at the point that I wanted it to be. Now that I’m feeling better, I got back down to it and got it to the point that I wanted in about an hour or so worth of work (told you I was close).
[EDIT] You can download it from CodePlex. (thanks Alan!)
Release Notes
This is a Tech Preview. Read: nowhere near final. It’s not even up to what I’d call a beta. I’m putting this up primarily for feedback from the community and (hopefully) to generate some additional interest. It does show the direction that I’m going with this and I hope you’ll notice that, while the underlying functionality is pretty complex, it’s easy to work with and easy to change the UI. I have avoided duplicated any code as much as possible, though I may have missed something.
User Interface elements:
Most of the user interface is encapsulated in User Controls, which you will find in the Controls folder. I think that the names should be self-explanatory. For simplicity, data binding is used whenever feasible. Yes, it is not the most attractive. If there is anyone with better design skills, I’d be happy to hear from you.
Implemented functionality:
It’s the very base functionality; you have catalog display and navigation, cart functionality and checkout functionality. Checkout does not, at this time, call any of the payment processing components but the code will be (for the most part) the same when that does get added in.
Installation:
Unzip the file to a folder on your system. In the Data folder, you will find a backup of the Sql Server database that is used for the site. If you restore this to “.\SqlExpress” in a database named “CommerceDb”, you will not need to make any changes at all to the connection strings. If, however, your database is different, change the connection strings that are in the web.config.
Coming next:
Added actual payment processing. Would like to get login implemented as well; we’ll see about that.