In one of the production commerce server instances of my client, I suddenly found this error getting logged since a couple of days. Now, the text of the error has nothing to do with Commerce Server 2007 but everything to do with the Sql Server 2005 that...

Yesterday I came across a very strange Commerce Server Staging error at one of the production boxes of the customer am working for. Strangely, for some reason, the Staging server stopped and started to throw out the below error:   Event Type:       ...

A common requirement of any secure website is to make sure that when a user traverses to a "sensitive" part of the website such the login page, the password reset page or even the personal profile page which might contain contact detail you...

The MSDN's Managing Profiles section of the commerce server gives an in-depth view of the working of the profile system and the steps needed to create custom properties for the UserObject. The Extending the Profile System section gives out detailed steps...

The EntLib 3.1 is simply superb, right?! Well, I would give a typical consultant answer... "It depends!". It depends on the developers who are using it and it depends on motivation of the developers to know the component before "copy-pasting" code and...

When you are trying to import a large catalog into the commerce server catalog system you might come across this error: The import failed because the import file is larger than the maximum size allowed on your server.  Contact your system administrator...

Its quite a common scenario to have a feature in a web site to check for the credentials of the user before allowing a particular download. For example, there might be some documents which should be visible only to a set of users and not to any others...

One of the most common problems when developing any web site if the need to use Symmetric Encryption to save some data in the Cookie so that it can be looped back to the user's session / identity. .NET provides a very robust mechanism in which this can...

I did some qualitative analysis of the referrals of my blog, and found that a majority of the search terms are for Commerce Server Code Samples or for Commerce Server API usage samples.Though some very good code samples are available at the Microsoft...

Sometimes it becomes necessary to call an external web service in a multi threaded manner to speed up processing of records that we have in a buffer so that the overall time spent in waiting for the calls to return is reduced. The high-level steps to...

The official documentation for the commendable SetJoin API in commerce Server 2007 seems more like a class reference without any code samples or introductory material into the way SetJoin should be used. So here's the "low-down" as to how a SetJoin API...

When you are configuring a clean install of Commerce Server 2007, you'll definitely need to go through the hellish and longish configuration steps that this document specifies. But once in a blue moon you might get this Application Pool Invalid Identity...

Problem: An application which you are developing is using UAB ( Updater Application Block ) to pull in updates from a server. There is a requirement to uninstall the application using UAB with the help of an MSI, but the uninstall needs to happen conditionally...

Problem: An ASP.NET 2.0 web application needs to detect a session timeout condition so that the user can be redirected to a different page and / or an error message is displayed. Solution: There are three ways of approaching this problem, starting...

Problem: A common scenario while installing application which consume certificates from the Other People store (or AddressBook in registry terms) is the failure of CertMgr.exe on a clean machine which doesn't have any other certificates. Now the problem...

Problem : The setup project (MSI) output generated out of the VS 2005 IDE fails to run properly on Vista. Specifically it has two glaring, known issues: The Deferred Custom Action is NOT marked with the NO_IMPERSONATE bit which results in the custom...

Problem and the Solution Problem : An application we are developing needs to always ask for Admin elevation (even for standard users) to run properly. If the users are standard users, then we need to have the UAC popup with the standard edits to ask...

This article is targetted at the newbie who's trying to conduct some meaningful performance testing of a typical ASP.NET webservice. Typical, in the sense, having a multi-tiered architecture and maybe interfacing with an external application and/or Web...