How to make a product catalog in C#?

Question

I need to develop a product catalog (about 4000 products) application, which would be given to clients on CD or DVD. The catalog exists in webpage format using PHP and MySQL.

IMPORTANT: the application is given to clients who maight have old PC, old System. For minimal requirements I would put Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 (if needed).

I need the following features:
1 search option (after productID AND after keyword)
2 print option (by selecting multiple products)
3 shopping cart (making a list which will be sent to an email address if there is any Internet Connection on the computer)

When I was asked to do it I had 2 days to realise a very basic version, so I took the whole website and exported it in HTML pages, and developed an application in C# which contains an embeded browser. So the whole website is now static and put on a CD. Everything fine so far. Now here are the problems:

1. the search option was realized by parsing the html files and reading the productID or looking for keywords inside of them. Put on a CD it was extremely slow (searching in 600MB of html files). FOR THIS I WOULD NEED A SOLUTION WITH A STATIC DATABASE (USING ACCESS OR SOMETHING) TO HAVE INDEXED ROWS, SO THE SEARCH COULD BE A VERY FAST ONE.
2. the printing option was a simply call of the embeded Internet Explorer print functions. Here are two problems: 
          a) user needs IE7 for printing the website scaled (FIT TO PAGE), otherwise the edges of the page are cut down.
          b) users of this app does not have even the basic PC usage skills, so they can't set the printing settings, so there will appear in header and footer the page numbers and titles. QUESTION: can I set these settings from CSS for printing?
3. couldn't make a a shopping cart as I don't use a database, so I have static websites and content is inside the HTML.

QUESTION: WHICH ARE THE BEST SOLUTIONS FOR THE PROBLEMS DESCRIBED ABOVE? PLEASE ANSWER EVEN IF YOUR ANSWER IS FOR ONE QUESTION ONLY. THANKS

Answer 1

I know this is completely different to the direction you're going in, but could you use an Excel spreadsheet instead?

One sheet for the complete catalogue & searching.

One sheet for individual item display/printing.

Answer 2

How about using javascript and cookies/url variables, for passing the shopping cart around? Is javascript enabled in you embedded browser?

Answer 3

Hi Ervin,

If you have existing applications written in PHP / MySQL, maybe it is better to use XAMPP and put the application on a CD than to write new application from scratch.
In this case user doesn't need to install .NET Framework on his computer.

If you must write C# application, convert your MySQL database to xml file and load it into memory on application startup instead of parsing html files.