Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for November, 2005
ASP.net 2.0 Commerce Starter Kit
Nov 18th
Microsoft is clearly making an attempt at promoting opensource applications that use their tools and run on their platform, CommunityServer, DotNetNuke, and the starter kits are clear examples of this. I stumbled on the ASP.net 2.0 commerce starter kit last night and have to say it’s pretty darn nice. It’s the work of http://www.wekeroad.com and is just in it’s infancy compared to some of the other applications out there. One of the great features of this application is that it’s been backed by Microsoft and PayPal and works with PayPal Pro right out of the gate. For the past 10 years I’ve a great deal of working with e-commerce and in fact wrote my own shopping cart application 10 years ago in Perl and MySQL and can attest to the great joy and pain associated with such a task. Back in 99 when appliedi.net was founded, it was founded to cater to e-commerce based sites and continues to do this today with over 80% of it’s clients being ecommerce based sites. I can honestly say that a decent opensource (read free) ASP.net based shopping cart does not exist, there are a couple outstanding ASP.net based commercial apps (BVcommerce and Storefront) but many clients are put off by these applications because of their cost.
SQL2005 Express Edition, Free Free Free
Nov 9th
SQL2005 Express Edition is Microsoft's follow up to MSDE2000. MSDE picked up tons of following and has been in use all over the place. Unfortunately for a web application it really didn't cut it and would be quickly outgrown. SQL2005 EE will replace MSDE and doesn't have the same 20 concurrent connections limitation that MSDE had. Here's the new limitations for SQL2005 Express Edition: – No query or workload governor (this is a big plus) – Limited to 1GB of RAM, it doesn't sound like alot but it's more than enough for most servers – Database sizes limited to 4GB in size. Again this is HUGE for databases most databases never make it over 20MB. – No Clustering (not an issue for most) – No Mirroring (not an issue for most) – No DTS (okay maybe a problem for some, but most don't use it) – No Full Text Search (okay, this is kind of bad, you won't be running sharepoing on express and probably most forums use full text for their search now too) – No Notification Services (what you don't get enough pages already?) – Replication as a subscriber only, still makes it a worthy backup server solution – No Analysis Services (no comment) – Service Broker, subscriber only – No Built in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) but you can download this from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=82AFBD59-57A4-455E-A2D6-1D4C98D40F6E&displaylang=en – No Reporting Services, that's a tiny ouch. – No backup/restore utility, this can be fixed via http://www.sqldbatips.com/showarticle.asp?ID=27 – No job scheduling (aka SQL Agent service) I think that's all of them but I'm not SQL expert so I probably missed some of them. I think the big limiting factor here is going to be no backup and restore utility. I'm off to install SQL express myself now though and see how she does…
