A recent posting in the AspDotNetStorefront forums got my brain spinning on how best to accomplish this. The technology to do this, once written, should be able to be leveraged in other areas that clients of mine have been looking to do. So, out comes Visual Studio and Google to come up for some starting points on how to accomplish this... [More]

Interested in outsourcing your email services but are afraid of what affect this might have on  your corporate mandate (can you say “Sar-Box”) to retain copies of email and to do so securely? Well, Google has announced a webinar with a live Q&A session to be held on Tuesday June 9, 2009 at 9am PDT (12 noon EDT/17:00 GMT). You can learn: How to take advantage of cloud solutions today to better your business and save money! How cloud computing can provide you with an affordable and secure solution for archiving business emails Why email security in the cloud is more effective than the running email in house (in most cases) And best yet, if you register for this free webcast, even if you can’t make it, you’ll be sent a copy of the recording for later viewing. Or better yet, when you get the link, you can share with those around you; perhaps event that stake holder that has been preventing you from moving forward with moving your business’ email into the cloud! Register for free email security and archiving webinar.

I recently completed a search page upgrade on one of my client websites (http://www.tobacco-barn.com) and was pleased enough with some of the code on this that I thought I’d share it with the community. Our goals were as follows: Limit search to just show products and not each variant of the a product Include images with the search results Include a description (no more than 500 characters) with each search result Try and maintain all changes within the page.search.xml.config file More...

While doing some updates to the EmmCLA program (more to come on this soon), I needed to have it loop through all the AppSettings in in App.Config file (the same should hold true for Web.Config for web apps) to find all occurrences of appsettings that were similar to a certain string. A few Google searches later led me to the solution of using System.Configuration.ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings.AllKeys which returns a string array of all the keys in the AppSettings portion of App.Config: // Loop through all AppSetting keys to find those // matching DBConn-xxxxstring[] AppSettings = ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings.AllKeys;foreach (string s in AppSettings){if (s.ToLower().Contains("dbconn-")){ // Do Something Here }}I’ve posted this in case anyone else finds a need to do something similar. This saved me a great deal of work and hopefully someone else will similarly benefit. If you find this of some benefit, please leave us a comment below and let us know how you are using it.

I got a Google Alert about an article posted recently by UK Developers over at WebOpius. The put together a nice little piece about how to get all three of these technologies up and running, and better yet, playing nicely together. This is the first of many posts by them on this subject. I very much look forward to seeing how the progress on this project as it may prove beneficial to my customers as well! In case you aren’t familiar, ASPDotNetStorefront (ASPDNSF) is the leading e-commerce solution for the ASP.NET platform. Google Checkout is a competitor (of sorts) to PayPal while WebGains is an affiliate facilitator where merchants can create and manage an affiliate network to help sell more. Some of you may be saying, but wait, doesn’t ASPDNSF have an affiliate program built in? Yes Virginia, it does. However, it is really more of a framework upon which to build your own affiliate program. Not only will an affiliate program like WebGains help you manage your relationship with your affiliates, but you will also have access to a ready market of engaged affiliates rather than having to drum them up and vet them yourself. Here’s a link to the original article: http://www.webopius.com/content/249/integrating-webgains-affiliate-network-with-aspdotnetstorefront/Do you have experience working with affiliates with your e-commerce platform? If so, please feel free to share your experiences, good and bad!

Here’s what you need to know about Canada’s Anti-Spam Bill that was recently introduced. Three are some significant differences between this and the US CAN-SPAM legislation that businesses will want to keep in mind as they pursue their marketing plans involving email communications with customers and potential customers alike. [More]