Commerce Server development for an Asp.Net guy

Question

Hello,

I'm looking to get a rough overview of the development activities typically involved in creating a fairly large store with some external systems integration on MS Commerce Server and how it differs from standard asp.net development

1) Do you typically start from scratch or start from the "starter site"

2) Do you typically create custom templates which access the store items to display through .net objects or do you need to use provided templateable CS webcontrols

3) Are templates and code artifacts for the store site (aspx's etc.) xcopy-deployed to the different environments (test/stage/prod)? Or is it done like in Sharepoint with deployment packaging

Thanks

Answer 1

1) Commerce Server comes with a sharepoint extensibility kit that contains a fairly robust set of e-commerce web parts. There is some ramp up time on getting to know the code and developing customization processes, but I think this is far less time than what would be required to build these components from scratch.

2) Not sure what you mean here, but Commerce Server's architecture does abstract data from UI. We are updating the Commerce Server web part HTML directly for our UI custimziations.

3) At first we were copying customized code directly into the sharepoint virtual directories (bin and UserControls). Now we've setup a crazy elaborative automated build/packaging scripted wsp building environment. I think this approach was good to take because our development team was able to work with and learn the extensbility kit while our scripting and environment teams figured what they needed to. Otherwise you have a linear process where all the enviroments and promotion processes have to be in place before you can start customizing code.