So now that the pool of ecommerce solutions for asp.net has been reduced by one more, what is a .net ecommerce type to do?

I’m actually in the process of porting my dashcommerce store over to nopCommerce, which seems to now be the big boy in the space (if not the only player?).  Take a visit to www.nopcommerce.com to find out more.

What I’d really like to see is a .net ecommerce store based on the new MVC framework. The projects I’ve seen in existence seem to get hung up on tuning architecture and have no real intention of ever releasing something useful. With this in mind, I started www.mvccommerce.com some time back… no content yet at time of writing this. The project is registered with codeplex  ( http://mvccommerce.codeplex.com) and will be looking for devs. If you just want to keep an eye on it, follow it at twitter – http://twitter.com/mvccommerce

I’m also a fan (and a dev for) MVCCMS, which has ecommerce capabilities coming soon, so you may want to take a look at it as well, at www.mvccms.com .

But for getting your (open source asp.net) store open asap, looks like nopCommerce will be the way to go for a while.   Add your comments if you have any other recommendations I may have overlooked.

So, my lessons learns so far in avoiding this:

-Dont use opacity settings. So far, I only had opacity levels set for some background fills inside a curve line. This would result in rasterizing both the curve line, fill, and apparently anything drawn behind it- which in my case included the entire background grid.

-(I havent verified this one, but-) dont draw geometry that extends past a clipped edge. For example, my curve lines would draw past the edge of the canvas they were displayed on, and the canvas had clipping turned on. Again, not verified, but i think this was causing rasterization.

- Don’t dump an oversized visual into a page that it doesnt fit in. This is another one I havent confirmed, but it seemed that the longer the data I shoved into a page (and which continued off the end of the page), the more likely some parts wound up growing jaggies.

If I find more, Ill add it here. Now I’m off to figure out efficient ways to chop up my graph into pages.

ReactOS – I’ve been watching this one a long time and it seems to be building steam. This is a free/open source clone of Windows… While still in alpha stage, and crashes are frequent, it is truly amazing how much windows functionality is working. Even Firefox 2.0 runs in it. I’ve been contributing some bug reports and compatibility report, and hope to get deeper involved in the future.

Cosmos – A .Net based OS… ok that’s a bit confusing, but basically you write .Net code and this project is able to compile the .Net into direct assembly language. Also a bit early, but also progressing nicely. I’m envisioning using this on some small and/or embedded systems in the future.

Phalanger – This is an awesome project which compiles PHP code into CLR… so you can run all those php apps in an IIS/.Net environment, and even develop in visual studio. Unfortunately it has gone a bit stale, the rumor I heard is one of the leads was hired by MS and doesnt have the time to put into the project any longer. I’m hoping the best for the project.

So while we’re fixing problems, any hints on why this keeps happening. I use a couple gmail accounts for personal and business use, and recently switched to thunderbird for my email client and connect to my gmail accounts using imap. I actually switched to thunderbird because Outlook 2007 was completely lousy at handling imap (complete freezups for minutes at a time), but that’s another story.

So this has been working pretty well so far, except for one annoyance. I have thunderbird save the passwords for my accounts, but google seems to suddenly reject or expire them somhow every couple days or so. No set pattern, just seems like every morning at least one of my accounts needs me to re-enter the password, even though it still shows the “******” (my saved password) in the login box.

I havent figured out if this is a thunderbird problem or a google one, but whichever it is, gets annoying having to always redo passwords. I’m hoping this is one of those “doh how did I not see that” items.

I won’t go into all the things I tried to get this to work again, but FINALLY found the right combo to allow a locally-connected PDA (via activesync) to connect to a webservice running in the visual studio development webserver.

WM5+ apparently no longer likes to use the ppp_peer name for accessing the locally connected pc. I’ve read there is a replacement called dtpt_peer that should work, but so far this one is batting zero. Instead, you can use an IP that gets configged automatically by activesync. I wish there were a name to use in place of the ip, but if there is one, i havent found it.

Basically:

169.254.2.2  is the IP given to the desktop pc.
169.254.2.1 is the ip given to the PDA.

Why not just use this IP in place of ppp_peer and get busy? Well windows on the desktop also treats these ip’s differently from the normal local ip, and when a connection is made through them, they are treated as remote connections.

Step 1. Let’s configure Fiddler to accept external IP’s. Note: the method I used will allow connections from *anywhere*, which is a bit dangerous as it could allow others to use your proxy and do bad-people stuff through it. You should really configure fiddler to only allow remote connections from the 169.254.2.* range.

Check this box:

enable remote connections

Restart fiddler and your personal firewall will likely warn that fiddler wants to accept connections on port 8888, tell it yes that’s cool. Really, the personal firewall is a better place to go set some rules regarding the allowable ip range mentioned above.

Step 2. Add some script code to fiddler. Open the script editor and add this to the event called OnBeforeRequest, replacing the port 1234 with the appropriate one (the one web development server dynamically assigns):

if (oSession.host==”169.254.2.2:1234″){
   oSession.host=”127.0.0.1:1234″;
}

This entry will take the “remote” connection from the 169 ip and make it look like a local connection that the dev server will be happy with accepting.

Step 3. Setup the connection on the pda to use a proxy, and put the 169.254.2.2 for the proxy ip. For the http proxy portion, specify port 8888.

Step 4. Now open a browser on the PDA and connect to: http://localhost.:1234 , again replacing the port 1234 with your own. Yes, that is a “.” between localhost and the “:”. Go read on the fiddler website about it, I dont understand it either. If things work, fiddler should show your connection attempt in its log, and your mobile browser should show the locally hosted web content.

Now, you can use this same url scheme with your webservice calls from the PDA.

Warning! I also tried this same setup today with a compact framework 1.0 app. It *almost* worked, but the older CF.Net trimmed off the port number portion and thus was trying to hit port 80… and failed. As soon as I upgraded to cf.net 3.5, everything worked fine, and Im sure cf.net 2.0 is ok as well, though I should know better than to be sure of anything at all with winmo and CF.net dev

Driving on the interstate yesterday, I noticed some popping noises from my radio which happened to be running at elevated volume. Thinking I’d finally blown the factory speakers, I turned the radio down to investigate and figured out the noise must be coming from that strange increasingly-growing-thicker brownish streak on the road as it stuck to my tires and flung up under the car. 

I had to exit about that time and was more than glad to do so. However the junk flying off my tires continues for miles after I got off the freeway.

Once I parked atmy destination, I opened the door and immediately smelled something that was, well, pretty dang good smellin!

Apparently I had found a trail of thick sticky molasses leaked on the interstate. Some poor tank truck driver must have lost his cargo on his way to the candy factory, which instead made a nice tarmac-flavored candy coating on my car, complete with a light gravel topping.

I suspect I still have several gallons of it stuck on there. Everywhere Ive parked since, I’ve left a nice puddle of goo.  Fortunately I think it will dissolve in water, now I just gotta find a place I can submerge my car for week or so.