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Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 by RDA Software Engineer Shaun Sargent Building e-commerce websites is a keystone of business on the Internet. The ability to sell goods and services online is desirable to any organization, as it allows businesses to save on the overhead cost associated with retail stores while reaching customers in any geographic location. While beneficial, building e-commerce websites is also highly complex. Businesses must manage product offerings, inventory, customers, and incoming orders while collecting enough data to drive future sales and marketing campaigns. Microsoft responded to this challenge with their latest e-commerce platform, Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. Much of this product has been re-written from the ground up to take advantage of the latest technologies and customer demands. One of the biggest improvements of Commerce Server 2007 is that the Web client tool, BizDesk, has been replaced by four new client management tools. These tools install on business users' desktops, giving users full control to make updates and fine-tune their sites.
Commerce Server 2007 solutions are built on top of ASP.NET 2.0. This allows users to take advantage of all the great new features such as Master pages, ASP.NET AJAX, and various code-reducing features. While Commerce Server 2007 comes with a lot of systems and functionality, you only have to use the features that meet your needs, when you need them. The catalog system is perhaps the most important and commonly implemented feature of Commerce Server 2007. This allows business users to define, import, export and manage the products available on their e-commerce sites. The catalog system has a wealth of features to help you organize and manage your products, such as base catalogs, categories, products, inventory catalogs, virtual catalogs, catalog sets, custom properties and product variants. Developers simply use the Commerce Server API to retrieve this data and display it any way they see fit on a page. The inventory system, which makes its debut with the 2007 edition, allows you to control the minimum, maximum and monitor depletion levels of your inventory. This also allows you to import and export products with external suppliers via Microsoft BizTalk. Commerce Server 2007 comes with BizTalk adapters for catalogs, inventory, orders and profiles. The inventory system allows businesses to manage and offer products that are pre-orderable, back ordered, and in-stock. The marketing system is useful for targeting products to users and personalizing their online experience. This system allows you to create online advertisements, discounts, and mail lists to increase orders. These campaigns can be global or targeted to specific users based on business rules. Targeting users is accomplished with the profile system, which records how users use the site and who they are. This data includes their click history, account information, and more. The profile system is extensible, so you can create your own profile definitions, allowing you to determine what type of information is captured and the method employed to collect the data. With this information, you can create personalized coupons or online ads targeted to specific customer demographics. Commerce Server 2007 also includes a Data Warehouse system that enables businesses to further analyze the traffic and data from their websites. This system imports Web logs, data from profiles, campaigns, transactions, and catalogs through pre-built DTS packages. Once the Data Warehouse has this information, it populates pre-built online analytical processing cubes to drive extensive reports. Commerce Server 2007 comes with numerous prebuilt Reporting Services reports to quickly capture the information users need, and monitor the site's activity.
By RDA Principal Architect Ray Barley Microsoft announced the immediate availability of the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 at TechEd 2007 in Orlando, Florida on June 4, 2007. A CTP release is a downloadable preview of a product that users can work with in a test environment to try out the new features before the actual product is released. During the product development cycle there will typically be several CTP releases. SQL Server 2008 is built around the following technology themes: · Mission Critical Platform for All – SQL Server 2008 will provide a more secure, reliable and manageable enterprise data platform, including an innovative, policy-based declarative management framework allowing administrators to define policies to be enforced across all database servers. · Redefining Pervasive Insight – SQL Server 2008 will provide a more scalable infrastructure for business intelligence and empower users to easily consume data via increased integration with Microsoft Office. · Beyond Relational – SQL Server 2008 will enable developers and administrators to store and consume any type of data from XML to documents, including a new spatial data type for map-based applications and a new integrated transactional file system to allow storing large database objects directly in the file system. · Dynamic Development for Data Management Solutions – SQL Server 2008 will provide an integrated development environment with Visual Studio and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.0, accelerating development with a higher level of data abstraction with a new entity-based framework. The highlights of the initial CTP release include the following features: · SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) – the script task and script component now support development in C# and full debugging capabilities. · SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) –the user interface for creating and editing dimensions is enhanced to guide users toward designs that follow best practices. · Star Join Query Optimization – improved query performance by recognizing common data warehousing join patterns. · MERGE SQL Statement – added support for the MERGE SQL statement which is especially useful in data warehousing where data is inserted if it does not exist or updated if it does exist. MERGE is a single statement that handles both conditions. · Change Data Capture – a generic component that tracks database changes asynchronously and exposes the changes through a relational interface. This is another big enhancement in the data warehousing area where data changes need to be captured and used to update dimensions. · Table Value Parameters – provides an easier way to define a table type as well as allow applications to create, populate and pass table structured parameters to stored procedures and functions. · Declarative Management Framework – a policy-based mechanism to ensure compliance with policies for system configuration and to prevent or monitor changes. These new product features are all welcome additions to SQL Server. The Declarative Management Framework may well be the most compelling of the new features, reducing the total cost of ownership as it relates to enforcing consistent configuration and policies across all SQL Server database servers in the enterprise. The Declarative Management Framework is made up of three distinct elements: · A Facet is a high-level category within SQL Server; it contains a list of properties. · A Condition is a property expression that evaluates to True or False; it is associated with a particular Facet. · A Policy is a list of Conditions that are evaluated. The policy may operate in one of the following ways: · Rollback a transaction that violates the policy; i.e. prevent a SQL statement from violating the policy · Check on change - monitor transactions in real time and note any policy violations; i.e. allow a SQL statement to violate a policy but log the fact that the policy is violated · Check on schedule – check for policy violations on a periodic schedule In the next section, we will look at an example of how it works. Declarative Management Framework – ExampleIn order to walk through an example of the Declarative Management Framework, assume that an organization wants to enforce a policy whereby all databases will have the AutoShrink property set to False. If the AutoShrink database property is set to True, then the SQL Server database engine will reduce the size of any data files that have excess space in them. Many organizations do not want this function to be performed automatically; rather they will analyze the database file sizes and shrink the files manually. The screen shot below shows where the Declarative Management policies are defined within the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Expand the Management node; expand the Policy Management node. At this point you will see the Policies, Conditions, and Facets group nodes.
Right click the Database Facet, select New Condition from the context menu, and create the Condition that you want to enforce in the policy.
Notes on specifying the Condition: · You can specify multiple And/Or Expressions in a Condition. · The Field column displays a drop down list of the available fields based on the Facet. · The Operator column displays a drop down list of choices: =, !=, LIKE, IN, NOT LIKE, NOT IN · You enter the Value column. Right click Policies, select New Policy from the context menu, then fill in the policy which references the Condition:
By default the policy will apply to every database on the server. You can click Edit Filter … to specify And/Or Expression filter(s) to limit the policy to particular databases on the server. You can Export the policy and Import it to other servers. To test this policy, right click on the policy then select Test Policy from the context menu. The following dialog is displayed showing the databases on the server and whether they are in compliance with the policy:
ReferenceFor the latest information on SQL Server 2008 including download instructions, white papers, webcasts and sample code, visit the following URL: https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/content/content.aspx?ContentID=5395
Building an Extranet with Forms-Based Authentication using WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 by RDA Senior Consultant Deepak Gupta On October 17th, 2007 RDA Senior Consultant Deepak Gupta delivered a presentation to the Philly.NET user group on leveraging ASP.NET's Provider model to build Forms-based Authentication in a SharePoint site and roll out an Extranet to your customers, contractors, etc. Deepak Gupta is a Senior.NET Consultant for RDA Corporation. He has over 15 years of experience in developing software with Microsoft Technologies. For the past several months, he has been heavily involved with designing, implementing and maintaining solutions with MOSS 2007, Office 2007, WSS 3.0 and ASP.NET 2.0. He is originally from Mumbai, India and currently resides in Exton, PA.
Click here to download the slides from the presentation. Click here to download the instructions for the demonstration lab.
Visual Studio 2005 Tips and Tricks by RDA Software Engineer Steve Andrews Based on real life experience of 8+ hours a day developing with Visual Studio 2005, learn some sweet tips and tricks to tame the IDE. With something new for everyone, these techniques will give you valuable information to start using right away, increase your productivity, and make you wonder how you survived all this time without them. Steve Andrews is a Software Engineer with RDA Corporation with over 8 years of experience implementing custom Microsoft solutions in the Financial, Medical, Manufacturing and Retail industries. Steve is also an MCP, ICSOO, and .NET fanatic. You can visit his blog at www.dotneticated.com.
Click here to download the content from the presentation including a draft version of Steve's E-Book entitled Tame the IDE: Visual Studio 2005 Tips and Treats.
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