My Wifes Gift Basket business
I mentioned on the ASP.Net 2.0 tour that I was working on an ecommerce site for my good wife Janine. Janine who is american noticed a gap in the market when we moved back to the UK - selling gift baskets to the great british public from her site www.giftbaskets4u.co.uk. So as I said in my tour I can come home after a week on the road and do some more work at the weekend!
Anyway its been a very interesting experience. In Microsoft we tend to think big company thoughts and do big company things so its interesting to see how a small company works. And believe me Janines company is small. She is hosting the site on www.bcentral.com which is Microsofts small business service. Like most hosting companies they restrict what you can do and what you get. Janine has an access database, email, storage and support for ASP.Net.1.1. However she cannot call external DLLs or call or provide web services. And of course there is no ASP.Net 2.0 yet which for me is most frustrating.
So I am now looking for a hosting company that will allow her to use ASP.Net 2.0 so I can go through the migration process and report to you here. If anyone would like to recommend one please let me know. It would be great to do some web services and I also will write a click once app to handle the client side of the fullfilment process.
So here are the key things I really want to do to www.giftbaskets4u.co.uk when I migrate:
- Use the SQL 2005 membship provider so I can separate off the admin functions from the rest of the site and create a community.
- Use Master Pages (please oh please let me do this!). I have spent hours at the weekend making all the pages have the same look and feel.
- Migrate from the Access database to SQL Server Express 2005. Those MDF files are just like MDB's but more powerful. Then use the cool new caching features.
- Rewrite the admin pages that use the master-details reports.
Of course I am having way too much fun with this but it beats having to mow the lawn on a saturday.
