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The much anticipated Starter Site for Commerce Server 2007 is now available for download. With the release of the Starter Site we have also officially launched the Commerce Team Blog which is what will be used going forward for all Commerce related blog postings directly from the product team. Apart...

Commerce Server 2002 SP4 is now live and available for download ! SP4 rolls up all existing QFEs and hotfixes, and can be applied to both CS2002 SP3 and FP1 installations. You can go through the main SP4 Readme document to learn more and also go through the list of bug fixes included with SP4. An...

I know this has been asked a million times by now - When are we getting the StarterSite? Well Ryan has the answer . The short answer is next week - but not for production sites. The long answer is October 2006 . Hope that puts a lot of those questions to rest.

This was a question recently posted on one of the Commerce Server newsgroups and I thought I’d write a post on it since it seems like it should be of interest to others as well. In this post I shall give a step-by-step overview of how to create a custom property on a User Object Profile and how to view...

One of things you might need to do occasionally is to run pipelines from code which is not running in a web context (i.e. the code is not part of a web site or web service). This could be a console app, a WinForm app or even a Windows service. The reason this is a non-trivial task is firstly because...

Just wanted to highlight a couple of points about the Customer and Orders Manager Business Application that is shipped as part of Commerce Server 2007 : You can run the UI with only some of the web services defined.Simply launch the UI and in the connection dialog box, remove the entry for the...

In case you have been playing around with Payments in Commerce Server 2007 , you might have noticed and wondered about this property on the CreditCardPayment class: CreditCardNumber . No matter what you set it to, a save and reload of the Basket / PurchaseOrder always results in the value being lost...

Just wanted to highlight the key difference between these 2 APIs which can both be used to display the set of ShippingMethods which are enabled in the TransactionConfig (the site resource) database. Points to be noted: · Both only return enabled ShippingMethods in the system. · GetShippingMethods...

An often asked question while working with the Order system in Commerce Server has been whether it is possible to use a predefined order number instead of having the Order system generate it for you. The answer is Yes and here is how you can do that. Generally what is referred to as “order number...

Here is a code sample which illustrates how you can achieve a common scenario on a B2B / B2C eCommerce site – placing repeated Orders containing the same set of products over and over again, without the hassle of having to search for and save the set of products you are interested in (think of an someone...

In case you thought that was all talk, take a look at the Customer and Orders Manager UI in the latest release candidate of Commerce Server 2007 . If you are moving from Beta, and are perplexed as to why you suddenly cannot open this UI anymore it is because we now require that the UI connect over SSL...

The Orders subsystem in Commerce Server 2007 offers some really powerful new APIs which can make your life easier. Some of the various operations and scenarios enabled by these APIs are: Searching for Baskets and Orders Deleting Baskets (probably you need to build a utility or windows service...

In this post I shall attempt to highlight the steps required to get a basic StarterSite Beta running on Beta 1 of Commerce Server 2007 (2006 back then) running on the just released Release Candidate of Commerce Server 2007 . I’ll assume that you have a StarterSite Beta unpupped and running on a...

Indexer properties (or weakly-typed properties as they are sometimes referred to - I can see Cathy, our doc writer, cringing on the mention of this term which she passionately abhors) are present on almost all the common Orders classes in CS 2006 such as OrderGroup (which is the base type for Basket...

A big welcome to Alan Faulkner who is a fellow tester on the Commerce Server team and will be posting (infact already has!) some very useful stuff concerning Data Warehousing (like how to setup DWA in CS 2006 Beta on SQL 2005 ), Commerce Server BizTalk Adapters and other CS areas in CS 2006. Among...

A lot has been happening on the CS 2006 front. Firstly we have our CS 2006 documentation up online at MSDN now, so you don't need to download anything if you just want to read about the various features and APIs in Cs 2006. There has also been some confusion around the CS 2006 editions and SKUs...

Quick post to expound on the multiple OrderForm functionality present in the Order Capture system in Commerce Server 2006 . An OrderForm can be thought of as a placeholder for a bunch of products / line items and associated data such as payments etc. The OrderGroup class (which is a base class...

In this post I shall run through some basic sample Commerce Server 2006 runtime site code to create a Basket, add an item to it and run it through the pipelines. We can then display the discounts that applied to the Basket (depending on what types of discounts you have created using the Marketing Manager...

It’s done. It’s official. It’s live. Our gift this holiday season to our customers is the Beta of the most advanced eCommerce release ever from Microsoft – Commerce Server 2006 . The Commerce Server 2006 Beta 1 is now publicly available on the web. Download it and start playing with it - we are dying...

I am back to my blog after a bit of a break. I was out on vacation to my home town of New Delhi, India and was amazed by the number of changes taking place in Delhi, including the Metro Rail project , largely in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games scheduled to be held there. On the work front...

Sweeeeeeeeet! It is GREAT to finally have David Messner blogging on MSDN . David is the development manager for Commerce Server and is undoubtedly the most revered person in our team (both for his in-depth knowledge of the product and raw smartness). Everyone should subscribe to his blog to hear about...

If you work with Commerce Server you will find the following tools invaluable. These tools were created by Max Akbar, who recently joined our Program Management team, but has been working on Commerce Server for a long time and has a very detailed knowledge of everything Commerce Server. Kudos to Max...

Great to see that Ryan , the Group Program Manager of our team (Commerce Server) has started blogging on MSDN . With his extensive experience with all-things-commerce, his blog will prove invaluable to anyone interested in Commerce Server and related technologies. Subscribe right away!

Feels great to share the news that the 5th largest retailer in US (by fiscal year revenues) is now using Commerce Server to drive their Costco.com online store. If you needed to know whether Commerce Server can perform well at the top of the tier - well, here's your proof! As an aside - did you know...

If you have worked with Commerce Server 2002, you have probably used one of the Solution Sites which were shipped as great examples of how Commerce Server could be used in various ways. These included the very popular Retail site and the international Retail2002 sites. Unfortunately, though these sites...