Ryan R. Donovan's Microsoft WebLog : CS2007

BizTalk Server 2009 now works with Commerce Server

rdonovan — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 14:55:00 GMT

All internal testing has now completed - and we can gladly state that BizTalk Server 2009 works with Commerce Server, without issues or any special black magic required. This applies to both Commerce Server 2007 SP2 and Commerce Server 2009.

Hope this helps!

Data Migration to CS2009 from Prior Versions

rdonovan — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:20:00 GMT

A question got asked to me today about how to migrate data from Commerce Server 2002. It was obvious from reading it, that at least one person doesn't know that there is a data migration tool.

It will take data from all versions prior, specifically:

Commerce Server 2000
Commerce Server 2002
Commerce Server 2002 FP1
Commerce Server 2007

and migrate it to Commerce Server 2009. What's the catch? Some of the old catalog entities that got dropped in lieu of Catalog Sets and Virtual Catalogs in CS2002 (when migrating from CS2000) will be flattened. Other than that, everything will migrate with full integrity - ASSUMING that there were no unsupported changes made to Commerce Server's schemas (e.g. - you did not edit SQL Server directly and went through the provided schema editing tools).

THe best practices are, of course:

Backup your source data
Don't run the migration on the live source - do it on a copy

But with that - you should be good to go! Hope this helps...

Commerce Server 2009 - for the 2007 user

rdonovan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:05:00 GMT

A colleague asked me the other day – if I have a CS2007 site and don’t feel like changing it (much) at the moment, what’s in it for me to upgrade to Commerce Server 2009? A very good question indeed – I thought…

First, Commerce Server 2009 does not break any compatibility with Commerce Server 2007. So, code that runs on CS2007 will run on CS2009 – unmodified.

Second, Commerce Server 2009 includes a number of fixes over and above SP2 from Commerce Server 2007. So to get the most stable version of the CS2007 bits, one should be running CS2009.

Third is support lifecycle; Microsoft’s standard support policy is 5 Years of Standard Support and 5 Years of Extended Support. Standard support began in 2006 for Commerce Server 2007, versus 2009 for the 2009 version. So you automatically get 3 more years of support.

Fourth and finally is platform support – CS2009 is tested with the latest and greatest – and will be evolved throughout its support lifecycle.

With respect to some other questions:

Performance of the Core System (old) APIs will be about the same on '09 versus '07 - '09 does have more fixes as reported by customers rolled in than '07 SP2 though
The new Commerce Foundation APIs when used in an ASP.NET site will perform marginally better than the old Core System APIs if used correctly; less so if used incorrectly

So – that’s it in a nutshell. Hope this helps!

Some Virtual Catalog FAQs for April

rdonovan — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 07:47:00 GMT

I was sent several questions about Virtual Catalogs over this last month. So here are the answers...

Q: My understanding is that items and categories are including in a Virtual Catalog by creating INCLUSION RULES. Is there a limit to the number of INCLUSION RULES that I can create?

A: No. Though, practically speaking, there is a limit of ~80 base catalogs to a virtual catalog. And understand that the more of these there are, the more work SQL is having to do to stitch it all together. The best advice - is be practical and use common sense.

Q: At what point (# of items) do you think a VIRTUAL CATALOG should be MATERIALIZED?

A: It is a good practice to always materialize virtual catalogs in production. This minimizes query overhead. And not materialize them in the environment being used for business users - to ensure that data is always up to date.

Q: If I create a virtual catalog with 1,000 specific items (no variants or categories) do I need to rebuild the virtual every time I rebuild the base?

A: Base catalogs don't get rebuilt. So the scenario described would not apply. If you are using a Virtual Catalog View (virtual on virtual), it would apply as the Base would change, needing a rebuild of the Virtual, which would in turn need a rebuild of the Virtual View. You need to rebuild whenever underlying data changes - and this is triggered automatically by the Catalog system.

Hope this helps!

Feedback Requested: Removal of CS2000/CS2002 ISAPI Authorization Filter

rdonovan — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:05:00 GMT

When we shipped Commerce Server 2007, we began supporting ASP.NET Authentication for SQL Authentication and ADFS for Windows Authentication. In fact, this became the preferred and directed method to handle site authentication for Commerce Server. The legacy ISAPI authentication filter was maintained for backward compatibility, but was marked as deprecated. This story did not change for Commerce Server 2009.

For the next version of Commerce Server, we are proposing to remove the legacy CS2000/CS2002 ISAPI Authorization filter entirely, effectively forcing you to use ASP.NET Authentication or ADFS. If this will cause you a problem, please leave us a comment.

Still using Commerce Server 2002? What you need to know...

rdonovan — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:01:00 GMT

A reader sent me a question the other day asking about the status of support for Commerce Server 2002. It entered Extended Support as of July 8, 2008 - see http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-us&x=13&y=14&p1=1552 for details.

What does this mean? It means that non-security hot fixes, no-charge incident support, and design changes/feature requests are no longer available. Hot fixes can be acquired through the purchase of an extended support agreement. See http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy for more information.

Commerce Server 2002 customers should really consider upgrading to Commerce Server 2009, which includes (over Commerce Server 2002 and Commerce Server 2007 (CS2007)):

Support for the latest Windows Server, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, .NET Framework, and Visual Studio platforms (enhanced in both CS2007 and CS2009)
Considerable performance enhancements since Commerce Server 2002 (enhanced in both CS2007 and CS2009)
Inventory subsystem (added in CS2007) for managing quantity-on-hand and stock-out scenarios
Significant redesign of Virtual Catalog to allow for increased granularity and multiple levels of aggregation (added in CS2007)
BizTalk Adapters (added in CS2007) for interchange of Profile, Order, Catalog, and Inventory data with external systems and trading partners
The ability to customize order schemas and utilize SQL tables (as opposed to Binary Large Objects or BLOBs) for data storage (added in CS2007)
SmartClient Business User Tools for use on Windows desktops (added in CS2007, replaces the Business Desk)
Commerce Server Staging, for transactional staging of code, assets, and Commerce Server business data + programmatic extensibility model for custom actions (added in CS2007)
Complete data management API and ASP.NET Web Service for Catalog, Orders, Inventory, and Marketing (added in CS2007)
Production-ready ASP.NET site for quickly getting started (added in CS2007)
SQL Reporting Services for analytics reports (added in CS2007)
Next-generation .NET 3.5+ API programming model for developing Commerce Server sites (added in CS2009); this will be the unified programming model for future versions of Commerce Server
Integration between Commerce Server and Windows SharePoint Services 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 + Search Server 2008, including ~29 ready-to-use, business user-configurable Web Parts for rapidly developing sites using SharePoint and Commerce Server (added in CS2009)
Commerce Server Default SIte, which provides a production-ready reference implementation of Commerce Server and WSS + Commerce Server and MOSS (added in CS2009)
Data migration from Commerce Server 2000, 2002, 2002 Feature Pack 1, and 2007 (in CS2009)

Hope this helps!

Announcement: Commerce Server 2009 Release Candidate Available & SQL2008 App-Compat Update

rdonovan — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 05:39:00 GMT

Today has been a busy day in the world of Commerce Server. First, the Release Candidate of Commerce Server 2009 is now available. It's **almost** here!

Get the bits at:

ISO Download Image: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b7eeda01-5cba-4945-a44e-a6f5e3eed0b0&displaylang=en
Connect Feedback Center: https://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=643
Installation Guide and Readme: https://connect.microsoft.com/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?SiteID=643&DownloadID=15887

This distribution is intended to be a seamless in-place, side-by-side update for Commerce Server 2007 customers. Hence, it does need CS2007 Enterprise or Standard as a prerequisite. This release does include a Go-Live license.

The final release will be available soon. Stay tuned for further details! In the meantime, enjoy the RC - but, as always, be sure to check out the README and Installation guide first.

In other news, we have also updated our application compatibility information regarding using Commerce Server 2007 or 2009 with SQL Server 2008 with respect to the Data Warehouse/Analytics feature. This information only applies to Data Warehouse/Analytics Users. If you have CS2007 SP2 or CS2009 and **are not** using the DW/A feature, NO special configuration or instructions are required. I have updated my original blog posting - check it out at http://blogs.msdn.com/rdonovan/archive/2008/11/16/cs2007-sp2-now-supports-sql-server-2008.aspx.

Hope this helps!