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...

The official word is out (great to be able to share what we will be working like crazy on, for the next > 12 months) - Commerce Server will be coming out with the V.Next release in 2006 . Some big things to keep in mind, that will be added / supported...

If you have worked on Commerce Server 2002 then you have probably come across the Adventure Works Catalog which is shipped as a sample in the SDK. However, one common difficulty is in finding the images for the corresponding products in the catalog after...

Funny how some of the simplest things remain hidden from us - just got to know that a simple and easy way to install an assembly into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) is to simply open the %windir%\assembly folder in Explorer and drag and drop the DLL...

Very nice MSDN Magazine article by Duncan Mackenzie in which he defines and builds a generic tool (containing multiple utilities) to automatically upload documents to a client from a server with options to do various things after completion of the download...

I was expecting (and thus using in places) the Random.Next Method (Int32, Int32) to return a random number between the lower and upper limits specified, both inclusive . However I was surprised to discover that actually " the range of return values includes...

Nice to read about this very cool tool, zDrop , running on Commerce Server which helps eBay sellers to easily and cost effectively post and manage items on eBay. Would love to hear about any other publicly available tools you know of that utilize Commerce...

Just posted an article on the Pesticide Paradox and how Model Based Testing can help alleviate that problem. Among others things Terrarium 1.2 seems to have been released. I have been wanting to create an organism and play with Terrarium for some time...

In this article I will be attempting to explain one of the biggest (or what I feel is the biggest) drawback of traditional automation testing – the phenomenon of product code becoming more resistant to the test code and resulting in less bugs being...

Well it took it's time coming - but it's finally here. And just in time for my 3 year Microsoft anniversary (which required me to make the customary offering outside my office of 3 pounds of M&Ms - plus a few Starburst for selfish reasons!). I am...

Read about some "Ready-Built ASP.NET Components" (the English on that somehow doesn't sound right though) while checking out the MSDN mag CHM (mentioned by Stephen Toub here ) and decided to see what they offer. What really caught my eye was the name...

Loved this quote I got in my Quote of the Day RSS Feed by H. L. Mencken (no idea who he is though): " It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. " Love it when people humorously and subtly put man in his...

Interested in discussing FP1, SP3 and the future roadmap of Commerce Server? Then join the Commerce Server team for a technical chat , this June 10, 2004 (10:00 – 11:00 A.M. Pacific time), to get all your questions answered (or just click here to...

Not sure if my article on Model Based Testing warranted an article or not (am not sure when exactly does a post qualify as an article - anyone know of any guidelines?), but I did put it up, partly because I wanted to try out the Article section of the...

In this article I will attempt to give a brief overview of Model Based Testing (MBT) and provide links to help you dig in for more details. I have been increasingly getting more and more fascinated (obsessed?) with this paradigm, which I believe holds...

Discovered a really cool software some time back to help me type in Hindi . Problem was that I had lost touch with writing in the actual Hindi script (Devanagari) and plus there are all the issues related to typing a different language using the English...

Wow - we are on a roll! We just released Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Commerce Server 2002 . It is basically a roll up of all hotfixes (fixed as a result of QFEs or bugs found during internal testing) since SP2. One important thing to note is that SP3...

Yohoooo!!! Feature Pack 1 for Commerce Server 2002 has officially RTWed (which stands for Release To Web, so maybe it should be written as RedTW). You can download your own copy from here and start playing the awesome new Catalog and Discount management...

Pairwise Testing is such a cool thing if you ever have to deal with testing a program or an API that is suffering from a test matrix explosion (due to a large number of all permutation / combinations of all involved variables such as Operating Systems...

I knew about RSS Bandit but hadn't really tried it so far. Finally tired of SharpReader taking up tons of memory on my box, I decided to try RSS Bandit and am loving it. Especially the light memory consumption (compared to SharpReader). Next stop will...

Vinayak Tadas a Commerce Server developer just started blogging about CS tidbits. Really useful stuff and if you use Commerce Server for any sort of development work or are involved in it's deployment and maintenance, you will definitely want to watch...

My gripe with WinForms continues – this time with providing Help in a WinForm application. As before I was again sure (I’ve got to start having less faith) that when the .Net Framework HelpProvider Class is launched (by pressing F1) from within...

I was so sure that there just has to be a way to force the plus sign (+) displayed on the TreeView WinForm control - but looks like I was wrong. The TreeView control intelligently decides to show the plus and minus signs depending on whether a node has...

Was wondering if anyone knows about an add-on or some product which will let me add color to the output of SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer? The reason I could use it is that I was running a test in QA that printed out a lot of PASS and FAIL statements...

Well, looks like India got off to a fabulous start by winning a nail-bitting one-day cricket match by 5 runs (I wish I had seen this game - probably ranks as one of the best one day cricket matches in the history of the game). This was the first match...