Data Tools and Software Testing : Commerce Server

Final version of CS 2007 Starter Site and Commerce Team Blog now LIVE!

nihitk — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 00:24:00 GMT

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 from making it easier for all our customers to get the information from a single source, the team blog will also enable more product team members to contribute and share their expertise.

Enjoy the Starter Site and the Commerce Team Blog - from now on all my Commerce related technical posts will be only on the team blog, so make sure you subscribe to it immediately.

Commerce Server 2002 Service Pack 4 Released

nihitk — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 01:35:00 GMT

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 important note on the CS 2002 front is that if you notice that your BizDesk search has stopped working for profiles and orders etc. the likely cause is the security hotfix MS06-061 released yesterday that disables MSXML2 support in IE. You can read more about how to fix this issue by updating your BizDesk site code from this KB article.

Earlier versions of BizDesk used to register MSXML2 DLLs; however if you update the ClientSetup.CAB file in your BizDesk with the one included with SP4 the BizDesk setup will not do this for new clients - so that is another reason to go and download SP4 right away!

CS 2007: Starter Site Availability Plans

nihitk — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 22:25:00 GMT

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.

CS 2007: How to display a custom user profile definition in the Customer and Orders Manager?

nihitk — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 03:18:00 GMT

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 and edit that property in the Customer and Orders Manager UI shipped as part of Commerce Server 2007.

1) First let’s create a custom property, say “Gender” on the default out of the box User Profile definition.

a. Open the Commerce Server Manager MMC and browse to the Profiles global resource for your site.

b. Go to Profile Catalog à Profile Definitions à User Object and click on the “General Information” group and then the “Add” button to define a new property in this group.

c. Expand the Advanced section and in the “Map to data” click on the browse (…) button and select ProfileService_SQLSource à User Object à Custom Property 1.

d. Click on Apply and then click the Save button in the Toolbar to save this User Object profile definition.

Here is a screenshot of the user object profile definition with the custom property defined:

2) Next we will modify the PresentationInfo files to add the display information.

a. Browse to the file system directory where the Profiles web service for your site points to and open the en_PresentationInfo.xml file in an editor.

b. Browse to the <profile> section and under the <displayArea> node any a <property> element for the newly defined “Gender” property from step 1.

c. Save the XML file and repeat steps 2a and 2b for all language presentation info XML files you wish to launch the UI in.

Here is a what the XML with the <property> node added for the Gender property will look like:

<profile name="UserObject" displayName="User Object" description="User Object">
<displayArea name="main" displayName="Main">
<property name="Gender" displayName="Gender" description="Property to track Gender of user"/>

3) Lastly you will have to do an IISReset and then refresh the Customer and Orders Manager UI. Now when you open an existing user object or create a new one, you should see the Gender property show up on the Edit dialog. Here is a screenshot showing the Gender property on the new user object dialog:

Update: Thought it worthwhile to add a note that if you are trying this scenario with a custom profile definition (as the blog post claims it to be!) instead of simply some custom properties on the out-of-the-box User Object profile definition, then you need to ensure a couple of additional things as follows:

1) You need to have at least one property in the profile marked as searchable.

2) You need to create a scope for this particular custom profile. You can do so by running the CreateProfilesAuthorizationStore.exe tool in %Commerce_Server_Root%\Tools folder and give it the name of your site and the Profiles auth policy file.

CS 2007: Running Pipelines in a Console Application

nihitk — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 06:00:00 GMT

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 this is not a core scenario targeted by the Commerce Server platform and secondly because when you run a web app, a lot of the work required to run pipelines is done behind the scenes when the various Commerce related sections are parsed in the web.config at app startup time. The good news though is that it is possible to run pipelines in a console (or WinForm or Windows service etc. etc. you get the idea) app, thus making it easier for you to test your components or target a niche scenario important for your business.

I have attached a fully functional VS 2005 solution that illustrates how you can run pipelines in a non-web environment. Hopefully this sample should help you get started – though please keep in mind that this is purely for illustrating the core scenario of configuring and running pipelines in a console app and is not meant to showcase the design. Also please keep in mind that the use of attached code samples are subject to the terms specified here. Hope you find the sample code useful.

On a related note, there’s been a lot happening on the CS 2007 front. In case you haven't heard, we have decided to give away our Developer Edition for FREE - that's right - zero cost to you to get started with developing a full-fledged Enterprise level eCommerce site on the Commerce Server platform. We also announced the General Availability (GA) of Commerce Server 2007 to the all partners and customers and on the documentation front, launched the TechNet site for Commerce Server and have also made the CS 2007 Migration Guide available as separate download, which should help you learn all about migrating from earlier versions of Commerce Server to CS 2007.

Also, we have some web casts available on-demand on the TechNet site which also contains an article by Jeff Lynch on Integrating Commerce Server Orders with BizTalk Adapters. Kudos Jeff!

CS 2007: Things you didn't know about the Customer and Orders Manager UI

nihitk — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 05:35:00 GMT

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 web service which is not available or not in use. For e.g. if you are not using the Commerce Server Profile system, you can still use this app to view the Orders by making the Profiles web service URL blank. Note that if the service URL is populated and the UI cannot connect to it, then the UI will not launch. The key is to blank out the URL completely. Here is a screenshot:
You can use the UI to display extended Order system data. If you have an extended LineItem, called say, “ExtLineItem”, then once you have updated the mapping files and web.config etc. on the Orders web service, you should be able to view the extended entities on the UI and search on them (but only the strongly typed properties mapped to explicit tables – you cannot search on weakly-typed properties, irrespective of whether they are mapped or not). The only thing which will not be shown at all are custom classes (i.e. classes not derived from an existing Orders class) since there is no way for the UI to know how to display such entities. Here is a screenshot showing the an extended Order being viewed in the Orders UI:

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You can run the application without a SSL URL in the connection (but you really should try to use SSL if possible since sensitive customer data is involved).

You can customize the UI completely to display or handle any scenario specific to your business. Simply download the source code and tweak it whichever way you want. For e.g. to display your custom entities mentioned in point #3 above.

CS 2007: Where is my CreditCardNumber?

nihitk — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 02:55:00 GMT

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. What is going on?

Well, the short answer is that for security reasons, this property (as well as the Pin properties on the various Payment classes) was removed from being persisted in the database. For PurchaseOrders this is done by removing the mapping for this property and for Baskets this is done by not having this property in the GetObjectData method for the class (which is called when this class instance is being serialized for inserting into the marshaled_data column).

So if you do need this property to be persisted you will have to do the following:

In the case of PurchaseOrders extend the mapping and create one from this strongly typed property to an explicit column in the CreditCardPayments table.
In the case of Baskets, extend the Basket and add this property to the GetObjetData() method of the extended Basket.

Alternately you could also just store this property value in a weakly-typed indexer property or even in the CreditCardIdentifier property. No matter where you keep the value though, it is imperative that you encrypt this highly sensitive data when persisting to the database.

One important point to keep in mind is that when saving PurchaseOrders, any strongly typed property not mapped to an explicit column is dropped and will not be persisted to the database. You can have such a property for in memory site usage, but in most cases if you have a strongly typed property you will want to make sure that it is mapped to a column else the data will be lost on a Save.

CS 2007: GetShippingMethods and GetShippingMethods(String)

nihitk — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 01:37:00 GMT

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() returns ALL the enabled ShippingMethods in the system. Each languageId gets it’s own table.

· GetShippingMethods(String languageId) returns the ShippingMethods for display for the languageId locale. The key point here is that it always returns all the ShippingMethods configured in the system, irrespective of whether they have a value defined for this languageId or not. If for a particular ShippingMethod the requested languageId is NOT found in the list of defined languages then the values for the DEFAULT languageId of the ShippingMethod is returned.

Nothing will probably make it clearer than an example. Imagine 2 ShippingMethods defined in the following languages:

	LanguageId	Name	IsDefault
SM1	en-US	SM1_enUS	True
	fr-FR	SM1_frFR	False

SM2	fr-FR	SM2_frFR	True

Now here is what happens when these APIs are called:

· DataSet allSMs = OrderContext.Current.GetShippingMethods();

In the case of GetShippingMethods() 2 tables will be present in the dataset, one called “en-US” containing SM1_enUS and one table called “fr-FR” containing 2 methods SM1_frFR and SM2_frFR.

· DataSet deSMs = OrderContext.Current.GetShippingMethods("de-DE");

In the case of GetShippingMethods(String) only one table called “de-DE” will be returned but it shall contain 2 entries for each of the 2 enabled methods in the system as defined in their default languages, thus entries for SM1_enUS (default for SM1) and SM2_frFR (default for SM2) will be returned.

By the way, the same behavior applies to the OrderContext.GetPaymentMethods() and OrderContext.GetPaymentMethods(String) methods as well.

Commerce Server 2007: How to use a predefined tracking number for placing an Order?

nihitk — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:30:00 GMT

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” is just a friendly string by which the placed order can be uniquely identified (the unfriendly way is to just use the OrderGroupId). The actual property name on the OrderGroup class which corresponds to this is the TrackingNumber property. In the default processing of the order, when the Basket.SaveAsOrder() method is called the Basket is deleted and the PurchaseOrder created. This is also the time that the TrackingNumber property either gets populated with a system generated value (which is basically a sequential numbering based off the IdentityCounter table value – and yes it does take care of a web farm scenario and no – it is not guaranteed to use every number in the sequence, for e.g. an IISReset among other things can cause this numbering to jump) depending on whether the property has been set on the Basket or not. So if you wish to use a predefined value, simply set this property on the Basket before invoking SaveAsOrder() and your value will be carried forward to the PurchaseOrder. If you do not explicitly set this property on the Basket the Order system will populate it for you with a numeric value converted to string. One thing to keep in mind is that there is no SQL constraint for the uniqueness for this property, so the onus is on you to ensure this unique when you set it on the Basket. Otherwise you can potentially end up with 2 Orders having the same TrackingNumber “12345”.

Sample code:

Guid uid = new Guid(CommerceContext.Current.UserID);

Basket myCart = OrderContext.Current.GetBasket(uid, "myCart1");

myCart.TrackingNumber = "12345";

PurchaseOrder myOrder1 = myCart.SaveAsOrder();

myCart = OrderContext.Current.GetBasket(uid, "myCart2");

PurchaseOrder myOrder2 = myCart.SaveAsOrder();

//Now myOrder1 has a user configured TrackingNumber of "12345"

//and myOrder2 has a system configured TrackingNumber (something like "6001")

CS 2007 - Recurring Orders Sample Code

nihitk — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 06:14:00 GMT

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 placing an Order for the same set of supplies every few months for e.g.).

In the Commerce Server 2007 Order capture system you can achieve this in a variety of ways, including iterating over and saving the collections you are interested in, in your own module (especially if you have an extended Order system where you want to control this completely). The sample I provide below uses the Named Baskets feature of CS 2007 and I think this is most appropriate here, because it gives a lot of flexibility (you can have as many wish lists as you want for each user browsing the site) and ease of site code development.

We first create a named Basket called “WishList” and add some products to it (in a helper function). We save this “WishList” and use the Add(OrderGroup) method to add all the items in this wish list to new Baskets created for the user (same userId Guid has to be used). Once the items are present in a new Basket, we can do the various operations such as running the pipelines etc. before checking out completely via the SaveAsOrder method.

Basket myWishList = OrderContext.Current.GetBasket(uid, "WishList");

AddOrderFormsWithValidLineItems(1, myWishList, 2);

myWishList.Save();

Basket myBasket1 = CommerceContext.Current.OrderSystem.GetBasket(uid, "myBasket1");

myBasket1.Add(myWishList);

//Run the pipelines etc. and then save as order

PurchaseOrder myOrder1 = myBasket1.SaveAsOrder();

Basket myBasket2 = CommerceContext.Current.OrderSystem.GetBasket(uid, "myBasket2");

myBasket2.Add(myWishList); //Same items are being checked out again

//Run the pipelines etc. and then save as order

PurchaseOrder myOrder2 = myBasket2.SaveAsOrder();

Hope you find the sample useful.

CS 2007 - Secure by Default

nihitk — Fri, 26 May 2006 21:45:00 GMT

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 by default. Those two last words are the important ones – since the default is what gets used in most cases. Is it a bit more painful? Yes. Is it more secure? Yes. It was important to go over SSL by default for the Customer and Orders manager because of the transfer of more sensitive data such as user passwords and payment information etc. Even though it will typically be in an intranet environment, you would be better off with all the data going over SSL.

So how do you get it to work, if you really are not interested in getting SSL setup in your intranet? Well couple of options if you just want to try this on your developer workstation or if you want to roll out the setup of the UI without the SSL requirement:

- Use SelfSSL on your developer box. As simple as installing the IIS 6.0 Resource Toolkit and running selfSSL.exe. An IISReset and your UI should now be all set.

- You can also disable the SSL check permanently by turning the following flag to True in the “%Commerce_Server_Root%\Business User Applications\CustomerAndOrdersManager.exe.config” in order to enable the UI to go over HTTP (instead of just over HTTPS):

<value>False</value>

</setting>

The world’s a safer place (with that value set to True)!

CS 2007 - Orders Data Management Sample Code

nihitk — Fri, 26 May 2006 06:21:00 GMT

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 which will delete you Baskets regularly – such as older than 2 days)
Updating PurchaseOrders (even bulk updates are possible!)
Deleting PurchaseOrders
Create, update, delete new PaymentMethods and ShippingMethods
And even more complex scenarios such accepting a cart from a vendor and placing it as an order on your site, via the AcceptBasket API.

Well, to do all of these and more, you can get started in a very simple manner as follows. I shall assume that you have the StarterSite, CSharpSite or your own custom site unpackaged and running on the development box.

The code to create the required management objects would look like (note that I show examples of both in-proc and out-of-proc order management context creation – you should use the one that fits the requirements of your application better):

//This creates the OrderManagementContext in an Out-of-proc mode and all the APIs go over the web service - so this is more flexible and portable

OrderServiceAgent orderAgent = new OrderServiceAgent(settings.OrdersWebServiceURL);

OrderManagementContext outOfProcOrderMgtContext = OrderManagementContext.Create(orderAgent);

//This creates the OrderManagementContext in an in-proc mode (Commerce Server has to be installed locally) and is therefore faster

OrderSiteAgent orderSiteAgent = new OrderSiteAgent("StarterSite"); //Or whatever your site name is

OrderManagementContext inProcOrderMgtContext = OrderManagementContext.Create(orderSiteAgent);

//Now you can access the particular manager object you are interested in

//depending on what you want to do and you can use one of the management context objects created above - you would have created either one or the other

BasketManager basketMgr = outOfProcOrderMgtContext.BasketManager;

PurchaseOrderManager poMgr = outOfProcOrderMgtContext.PurchaseOrderManager;

PaymentMethodManager pmtMethodMgr = outOfProcOrderMgtContext.PaymentMethodManager;

ShippingMethodManager shipMethodMgr = outOfProcOrderMgtContext.ShippingMethodManager;

The neat thing about CS 2007 is that almost all the subsystems work in a similar way (not exactly the same way though) – so a similar pattern can help you get started with the Marketing, Profiles or the Catalog subsystems as well. Party on!

Upgrading from CS 2007 Beta 1 to RC 1

nihitk — Tue, 23 May 2006 08:00:00 GMT

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 CS 2007 Beta. I’ll also assume that you have the web services unpacked and added as applications to the StarterSite (to allow you to run the UIs against this site).

Then the errors you are likely to hit and the steps to fix these errors are as follows:

Uninstall Beta – This would entail doing the following:

- Uninstall Business UIs

- Uninstall LOB Adapters for Commerce Server

- Uninstall Commerce Server

- Uninstall Client Tools if still present and showing in Add Remove Programs

Install Release Candidate

Browse to your site. You will likely get the following error message:

“Application is not compatible with '6.0' version of 'Transactions' resource. Expected resource version is '7.0'.”

This is because you need to run the migration tool / upgrade wizard (used interchangeably) to upgrade the site resource versions etc. and migrate the data in the various resource databases (such as Transaction, TransactionConfig, Marketing etc.)

Run the migration tool from All Programs à Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 à Tools à Upgrade Wizard, or by directly launching the exe from “%Commerce_Server_Root%\Upgrade\Upgrade\CS2007Upgrade.exe".

Upgrade all the site resources and global resources listed by the wizard for your site above.

Do an IISReset or recycle the IIS Application Pool (much faster than an IISReset) and browse to your site again.

Now you will likely hit the following error:

“Column CreditCardPayments.PaymentMethodName referenced in Orders storage mapping file has different precision than the corresponding entry in the SQL schema.”

The reason for this is changes to the Orders schema between Beta and RC for this property Name precision (along with other changes such as the dropping of certain columns such as CreditCardNumber and Pin from payment related tables) and the migration tool puts out the following warning which you likely ignored (and did not save to a text file for later) and which states what needs to be done:

Transactions

Warning: Please read following information carefully.

This migration tool does not migrate this version of transaction resource completely.

After running migration tool Compare the OrderObjectMappings.Xml from the site VROOT and the one installed under %COMMERCE_SERVER_ROOT%\SDK\Samples\SiteCreate\OrderObjectMappings.Xml and merge the changes.

Then regenerate the PurchaseOrder related stored procedure definitions using the OrderMapping.exe tool with orders configuration section in web.config pointing to updated OrderObjectMappings.xml

Run the generated sql script file on the transaction database.

In the plain vanilla case, if you do not have an extended Order system then you can simply copy over the OrderObjectMappings.xml and OrderPipelineMappings.xml files from the following location into the VDIR of your web app and the OrdersWebService corresponding to your web site: %Commerce_Server_Root%\Sdk\Samples\SiteCreate. This should fix the above error and any other mapping related errors which you are likely to hit.

Incase you have an extended Order system you will need to follow the more involved steps of regenerating the PurchaseOrder stored procedures (using OrderMapping.exe) and updating their definitions in the database.

Do an IISReset or recycle the IIS Application Pool and browse to your site again.

Your site should now be up and running without any errors.

So what about the web services etc. and what about the business UIs? Well you will need to update the Orders mapping files above in the Orders web service VDIR as well (in addition to your site VDIR) and then you should be able to bring up any of the UIs as well.

Another option you have with the web services is to remove the older web services from the Commerce Site using Commerce Server Manager and then add the newer RC version of the web services by adding applications to the existing Commerce site by pointing it to the CSharp.pup from the RC install. This way you get the newer web services with the updated web.config files (with more secure Authorization sections for the cache refresh – see the online readme for details) and the updated mapping files etc.

Most of these steps also apply if you take the StarterSite Beta and unpack it on the RC of CS 2007 since the resources will all be outdates and you will need to run the migration tool as above to get them updated.

By the way, one thing to note is that the version of the Commerce .Net assemblies themselves has not changed, so you do not need to update the web.config references etc. at all.

CS 2006 Orders: Are my indexer properties saved to the database? Where? How?

nihitk — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 04:01:00 GMT

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, PurchaseOrder and OrderTemplate classes), OrderForm, LineItem etc. One common operation that customers typically have done is to store certain values in an indexer property and store it to the database. This is still the case and all you need to do is save the OrderGroup class containing everything to the database to have this persisted.

E.g. (pseudo code):

myOrder.OrderForms[0].LineItems[0]["myCustomData"] = "Some biz data";
myOrder.Save();

Now when myOrder is reload from the database the "myCustomData" property on the LineItem on which it was set, will still be present.

By default these properties are all saved to the marshalled_data column in their respective tables and this should suffice for most purposes. However if you wish to persist these indexer properties to an explicit column of their own, you can do this in 2 steps:

Update the mapping file sections and add an explicit column, name of the indexer property and the mapping between the property and the column storing it's value. E.g. (partially XML snippets from the OrderObjectMappings.xml):

<Table Name="LineItems">
    <Columns>
        <Column Name=" myCustomData" DataType="nvarchar" Precision="128" IsNullable="true" />

<Class Name="LineItem">
    <WeaklyTypedProperty Name="myCustomData" />

<ClassTableMap Class="LineItem" Table="LineItems">
    <PropertyMap Property="myCustomData" Column="myCustomData" />

Create the associated SQL schema changes (either manually or by using the OrderMapping.exe tool to generate the SQL table definitions and stored procedure definitions for you - these include drop statements so use this carefully).

Now when you run your site code which populates these indexer properties, you should be able to see the indexer property values getting persisted into their own SQL columns. Not too hard is that?

And if you like that, wait till you try out the full fledged extensibility story in Commerce Server 2006 - it not only allows you to map all PurchaseOrder data to explicit columns but also allows you to inherit from all the Orders runtime class and extend it in order to define a much richer and fine-tuned-to-your-business Order system for use in your site code.

Alan Faulkner joins Blogdom

nihitk — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 08:51:00 GMT

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 other things in the world of CS 2006, if you have a CS 2002 site which you are trying to migrate to CS 2006 Beta, there are a bunch of issues that you need to be aware of and most of these (some rather nasty ones to figure out) should be covered in the CS 2002 to CS 2006 Beta Site Code Migration Whitepaper which is now available for download through the connect site. This is something you just have to go through if you want to save yourself time. Here is how it is described:

This draft document describes the process of migrating a Commerce Server 2002 with Feature Pack 1 single server installation running the Commerce Server 2002 Starter Site to the Microsoft Commerce Server 2006 Beta. It lists the various steps required and the various issues encountered during the site code migration process. These steps are meant to be used as guidance while migrating the original Starter Site to Commerce Server 2006 and will not be the complete set of modifications required to get your site functional.

CS 2006 Beta has lately been in the news a lot as well and you can get a list of some of the coverage from this posting by Ryan.