On Monday I did a presentation with Chad Brooks and Dave Cameron at our local .NET User Group: MaconDotNet.
My sections were on LINQ and Code Generation. Other than me running a little long, the presentation went great. Here are my slides and examples but head over to the user group page to grab Chad and Dave's slides and examples when they get posted.
If you find any errors or typos, let me know.
(Note: I did a section on LINQ and a section on Code Generation. Not "LINQ and Code Generation")
I had a long break after Christmas that I used to work on some projects. Sometimes it is hard to get any free time and it was a well enjoyed break.
I didn't get as much done on my XNA project as I would like but I've been studying the book pretty thoroughly.
My main project that I worked on was to build a web page for my dad's business. He has an old brink-and-mortar style business that was started by my grandfather. My dad is pretty tech savvy but he never got around to building a web page for his business so I thought it would be a good project.
I got a lot done on that and I'm talking to my sister and my wife to help me finish writing content for the site.
For my dad's web page I decided to investigate what it would take to add an eCommerce section and see if he was interested in selling a few items over the 'net as well as in person. So I started looking for a good ASP.NET based free eCommerce solution preferably that had built in support for PayPal's free (mostly) services. I figured there had to be lots of them out there but I didn't know one off the top of my head so I decided to look.
Turns out I was wrong, or at least I couldn't find as many as I thought. osCommerce seems to dominate the PHP world with several other strong competitors, but I didn't find as many stand-out ASP.NET kits.
However I did find 2 that seemed to be the best.
Microsoft used to have an eCommerce starter kit that you could download for ASP.NET. I don't know the details of how this happened but the kit has now been taken over by someone else and is called dashCommerce. The code is published under a free open source license and a commercial license with the main difference being a support agreement and the requirement that the free version must always display a message at the bottom of the page that reads "Powered by dashCommerce".
The other good product I found, which is also listed on Microsoft's ASP.NET web page, is DotShoppingCart. This product has as far as I can tell the same general options as dashCommerce, that you can use a free open source version as long as you leave the "Powered by DotShoppingCart" message at the bottom of every page or you can buy a commercial license with a support agreement.
I downloaded both products and tried them out using PayPal's sandbox. (btw, PayPal's sandbox is a pain to use.) I liked both. They are both similar in the features that they offer. They both have basic CMS tools and product catalogs. Both allow products to have configurable attributes like Size or Color or whatever you need. dashCommerce gives each product a different SKU per attribute while DotShoppingCart seems to give a product one SKU no matter the attributes. Both require SQL Server 2005 Express (or greater) with Advanced Services. I believe the main reason for this is that both use the Full Text searching. I don't know if either uses any of the other Advanced Features. Both have source code. dashCommerce uses SubSonic and log4net while DotShoppingCart uses the MS Enterprise Library. Both appear to have IPN support but I didn't test it.
I would also like to point out that ComponentOne also offers a free control library for dealing with PayPal. I haven't downloaded it or looked at it but it might be worth checking out and kudos to ComponentOne for offering it for free.
What do most people use? Either of the items I've listed or do you roll your own? Or is there another free or low cost kit or product that I have missed?
A little update on the Zune issue I mentioned in my last post. Aeroxperience gives a good explanation of the bug and shows some source code here. The problem ended up being a bad way to calculate years and the date combined with a while() loop with a case that can loop forever. Check it out.
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