Last time I mentioned the new provider model that will allow for separate assemblies to be used for payment, shipping, and tax providers. While I’m fully involved in writing 3.0, I figured I’d try to go over some of the other changes that are going to make their way into dashCommerce 3.0 and specifically address them relative to community expressed issues and / or bug reports, so here goes . . .

My hosting provider won’t allow me write access to my web.config / How do I grant write access to my web.config?

Most of the configuration – at least all the configuration you would want to change at runtime – has been moved to the database. That means the configuration for the Payment, Tax, and Shipping Services has all been moved to the database. These are nothing more than persisted serialized objects. In addition, Site Settings are also kept in the database.

Why can’t I run dashCommerce in Medium Trust? / My hosting provider only allows for Medium Trust.

I’ve posted in the forums about this, but in case you missed it, while 3.0 goes a long way in getting closer to Medium Trust, the stick in our back is the whole WebPermission issue. When I originally reviewed this I assumed there would be some way to make an HTTP Post in .NET that would not require the WebPermission security demand. Oh, my oh my was I woefully wrong. :( But that doesn’t mean I wanted to get sloppy with Medium Trust. I wanted to keep as close as possible to it so that should the WebPermission eventually make it into Medium Trust, we would be right there ready to take advantage of it. So, that means the Enterprise Library stuff is also gone. I have a lot of experience with the EL so I really hmmmed and haawed over this, but in the end, I decided that the cost / benefit was too great. So, logging is being handled by log4net.

Why does dashCommerce have such a US slant? / Why isn’t dashCommerce localizable?

dashCommerce 3.0 will be localizable. The community has been great in stepping forward and offering translations. I’ll be pumping those files out to the voluteers when they are ready. This is no small effort for an application like dashCommerce – it’s been tedious and slow going, but I’m trying to be a good citizen of the world. :)

When are you going to upgrade Assembly X to the current version?

All of the assemblies are being updated to the latest version that works with .NET 2.0. This includes upgrades to SubSonic 2.0.3, ASP.NET Ajax and the Ajax Control Toolkit, and the previously mentioned log4net.

Please use FCKEditor!

Done. It’s everywhere and anywhere you edit good sized amounts of text.

Please upgrade the project to a Web Application.

Done, and I know I am much happier for it. :)

I’d like to see better skinning support.

Yep, me to! So, right now, part of your Site Settings configuration is to select the skin used for your dashCommerc installation. This is driven from the App_Themes directory, so just drop a theme in there and the admin side of the application will pick it up and let you apply it. The adminstration side of the application has minimal styling (it’s a very clean look and has been blessed by Brad). You’ll see more of that in the coming screencasts.

Why doesn’t dashCommerce have an upgrade path?

Suffice it to say we were paying for the sins of the past, but 3.0 will release us from those chains significantly, so we will have upgrade packages after 3.0.

There is a ton more, and I’ll be covering more as I go along here, but you should know that dashCommerce 3.0 is a complete re-write of the application. Much of the flow of the application is the same, but the code is different, so there is going to be a learning curve there for everyone. To mitigate that learning curve, I have tried to stay very consistent in the code – meaning I try to handle similar situations similarly. Also, there is, to this point, no inline-coding in the aspx pages, and this is for 2 reasons: 1.) It will should make the VB.NET conversion go a little smoother and 2.) in-line code that contains logic is just another place to go looking for stuff and I hate having to dig. :)

That’s it for now – I am going to try to crack the nut on screencasts soon – so there’ll be more there for you as well. If there is anything else you think I should be doing to steward this project forward, please let me know.