To ASPX, or Not To ASPX...

[Stoic Joker]

Greetings
   So the boss dropped by my office today to drop another (great idea) project in my lap. Which is basically a Quick-N-Dirty Shopping Cart type of affair. It will be publicly facing for (a specific) client access, but all orders will be processed internally through a single PO (e.g. No PCI is involved, needed, to be planned for). This is going to be strictly User Table -> Authentication Mechanism -> Product Table -> (and ephemeral) Order List "Cart".

   Now... (here's the weird part)... I'm debating on what to code it in, and speed is a factor (a huge one). ASP sucks, and PHP requires a bit too much pain staking care (considering I do it with a plain text editor) to meet the deadline. So I'm debating on taking the ASPX route because I can then speed things up using MSVS to hand the thing together quickly. The obvious downside being that I've never used it for that.

   I did however find a rather handy tutorial that I played with for most of this afternoon. It seem to do a fairly nice job of taking you from Hello World! ... All the way to the edge of the cliff... Which basically makes the question should I proceed in that direction? And if I do is VS2005 a good enough way to get there? Or should I jump to one of the newer ones (VS2008/2010) to avoid something that'll byte me in the ass down the road (or just screw me outa the gate)?

 Note: Ducking the project was also presented as an option...But I'm not that smart...

Thank you,
Stoic Joker


P.S. I'm also not adverse to starting with a sample code project, if anyone knows of a good one.

[Renegade]

I'd say use VS 2010 as you can use any .NET version there. It's like having 2005 and 2008 at the same time.

But there are a ton of things out there that can help you get it done fast. There's no reason to build that when you can buy it or get it for free. DNN has a shopping cart already built in and you can get commercial modules for it.

Say you end up spending $500 or $1000 on a solution... Check it out and figure how long it would take you to build it, and then figure out how much your time costs. It's highly unlikely that you can build something for the same or lower.

I did almost the exact same thing using DNN and the included shopping cart. It sends email notifications and saves the transaction in DNN with a state, e.g. In progress, ordered, delivered, whatever, etc. I used "clientname.domain.com" and used restricted access for who can login. The client got a login there, and could order whatever they wanted. I sorted tabular data in Excel, then used regex in EditPlus to create SQL that I ran directly in the database (or could have run from inside DNN too) to populate the tables with large numbers of products.

[Stoic Joker]

DNN?

[skwire]

DNN?

-Stoic Joker (May 25, 2011, 06:25 PM)

I'd assume DotNetNuke.

[Renegade]

On a semi-related note, for "ASPX or not ASPX", I like to drop extensions as they contain no useful information for the URL. In DNN this module lets you customize your URLs very quickly, easily, and RELIABLY:

http://www.ifinity.c..._Master_DNN_SEO_Urls

I would highly recommend that module as I have used it and found it to be reliable. I'm using it at Super Simple for URLs like:

• http://www.supersimple.me/Photo-Resizer
  
• http://www.supersimple.me/FAQ
  
• http://www.supersimple.me/About

Etc.

I find having .../Default.aspx or .../About.aspx kind of dumb. There's no reason to have that junk in a URL.

At the moment I'm working on a spec for a site, and have decided to run with .../en/... - .../ko/... - .../ja/... in order to separate languages used at the site. I'll also use the iFinity module above for the site. It will make things nice an meaningful. I could end up going with something like:

.../en/About
.../ko/About

or a localized equivalent with something like this:

.../en/About
.../ko/회사소개

You get the same kind of thing in WordPress too:

http://cynic.me/2011...izer-korea-number-1/

I like that for blogs as it's clear about when it was as well as what it's about. A lot of large sites drop the day in the URL, but 6 of 1...

And since you're primarily running Windows stacks, DNN is just a drop dead simple solution.

[Renegade]

DNN?

-Stoic Joker (May 25, 2011, 06:25 PM)

I'd assume DotNetNuke.

-skwire (May 25, 2011, 06:28 PM)

Yes.

It's ASP.NET with MS SQL Server in the back. There are other providers though, so you could run it with Oracle or MySQL as well. It can use MS SQL Server Express too.

[Stoic Joker]

@skwire - Thank you, I was having a retarded moment.

On a semi-related note, for "ASPX or not ASPX", I like to drop extensions as they contain no useful information for the URL. In DNN this module lets you customize your URLs very quickly, easily, and RELIABLY:

http://www.ifinity.c..._Master_DNN_SEO_Urls

I would highly recommend that module as I have used it and found it to be reliable.

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 06:36 PM)

   I'll keep that in mind for the future, but at the moment I'm (not going for style points) trying to "Hand-Job" as much as possible to keep the IT budget down to make room for a much needed hardware refresh. We got a bunch of antique whitebox XP machines here that I'm dying to get shed of.

   I did find this: Shopping Cart using C#.NET, Web Forms and SQL Server which should be a perfect way to spike my learning curve and get this thing off the ground. I can reverse engineer damn near anything...So I'll probably take a crack at it in the morning.

I'd say use VS 2010 as you can use any .NET version there. It's like having 2005 and 2008 at the same time.

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 06:36 PM)

I'm not really up on .NET versions - Being as I've been avoiding it for years -  Is there some thing specific in 08/10 that I would/could/should need/be concerned with?

[Renegade]

VS 2005 will only let you do up to .NET 2.0. Which is fine for most things. However, you may want to use .NET 3.5, or a component may need that, so you'll want 2008/10 most likely. Basically, 2010 just gives you more options so you don't need to think about things as much.

DNN is free as well, so there's no cost associated there other than your infrastructure, which you already have.

I looked at that CP page. I don't know why you'd want to go that route though. I don't see any advantage to getting your hands dirty when you don't need to.

I look at things as just getting them done, and any coding that I can avoid is time I can spend on other things. (Like getting rid of Access databases~! )

DNN is super-easy to administer as well. You really should have a good look at it, as it sounds like it will do everything you want for little or no work and no up-front costs.

[JavaJones]

Why use an entire CMS when you could just use a stand-alone shopping cart? Assuming that's all the thing needs to do.

- Oshyan

[Renegade]

Why use an entire CMS when you could just use a stand-alone shopping cart? Assuming that's all the thing needs to do.

-JavaJones (May 25, 2011, 07:40 PM)

Because overkill is fun~! 

[Renegade]

Put it like this... Sure... you *can* hunt rabbits with a .22, but you can also hunt them with a Barrett M107A1 .50 caliber semi-automatic sniper rifle (with or without suppressor):



 

[Stoic Joker]

Why use an entire CMS when you could just use a stand-alone shopping cart? Assuming that's all the thing needs to do.

-JavaJones (May 25, 2011, 07:40 PM)

Because overkill is fun~!  

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 07:52 PM)

Oh fuck me...    


But seriously...

VS 2005 will only let you do up to .NET 2.0. Which is fine for most things. However, you may want to use .NET 3.5, or a component may need that, so you'll want 2008/10 most likely. Basically, 2010 just gives you more options so you don't need to think about things as much.

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 07:23 PM)

Hm... ok. At this point less options might be safer. (I'll have plenty of time to regret that assertion later...)

DNN is free as well, so there's no cost associated there other than your infrastructure, which you already have.

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 07:23 PM)

Ah! Okay... I saw the $120 price tag on the component you'd mentioned and assumed...  

I looked at that CP page. I don't know why you'd want to go that route though. I don't see any advantage to getting your hands dirty when you don't need to.

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 07:23 PM)

It's kind of a less is more thing. We already have to get a CMS which was selected by an outside contractor (see PM). I actually liked the looks of Concrete5, but haven't had time to explore it and/or push the issue. The one picked is CMS made simple. This little project is getting (quite literally) wedged into a corner somewhere ... In the hopes it won't conflict with anything major. There are quite a lot of things going on on that box... And I'd like to keep the load limit out of the red.

[Renegade]

For the client site that I'd mentioned above, I changed the DNS and had the site up and running inside of a morning with time to spare (I think it took me less than an hour). Done. From there on, it was only a matter of entering products.

I know I'm kind of harping on it, but time... There's just so little of it. Anything I can do to save me time is a godsend.

For things going wrong, I've never had a smooth PHP installation. I always need to tweak the INI file to stop modules (that are supposed to actually run properly) from killing PHP entirely. I'm not a fan of PHP on a Windows box. Yeah, I run PHP, but I cripple a lot of it so that it doesn't cripple itself. Kind of like breaking a lemmings legs so that it doesn't run off the cliff.

[Stoic Joker]

For the client site that I'd mentioned above, I changed the DNS and had the site up and running inside of a morning with time to spare (I think it took me less than an hour). Done. From there on, it was only a matter of entering products.

I know I'm kind of harping on it, but time... There's just so little of it. Anything I can do to save me time is a godsend.

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 09:20 PM)

Hm... Okay, I'll look into it in the morning.

For things going wrong, I've never had a smooth PHP installation. I always need to tweak the INI file to stop modules (that are supposed to actually run properly) from killing PHP entirely. I'm not a fan of PHP on a Windows box.

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 07:23 PM)

I don't think I've ever really had a problem with it. But I usually start with everything turned off, and then activate only what is required. It's the development time that kills me. Which granted is probably my own fault for not using some type of IDE.

Yeah, I run PHP, but I cripple a lot of it so that it doesn't cripple itself. Kind of like breaking a lemmings legs so that it doesn't run off the cliff.

-Renegade (May 25, 2011, 07:23 PM)

Hahaha  Consider that line officially stolen ... I love it!