Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Aspdotnetstorefront Out-of-the-box Build Error

My company has begun offering an ecommerce solution to small-to-medium businesses called Aspdotnetstorefront. On behalf of our client, I purchased and download the product and installed it in my wwwroot directory. I made no changes to any files, I simply clicked on the sln file and loaded the solution into Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition.

Before I did anything else, I tried to build the solution. I was unsuccessful, and of course, seriously perturbed...I may have said unfriendly things...so I sent an email off to tech support with a copy of the error.

I received a quick response (you gotta love responsive tech support) and they noted that I seemed to be referencing a file that should not be in that build. How could that happen? I looked in the directory, no file. Mysterious, eh? So I loaded the solution and looked in the directory, there was a file. Odd. So I looked at the path of the file, and it was a path to a storefront directory for a different storefront solution. Problem solved? almost.

I deleted all my files, extracted the download to my newly clean directory, and before I did anything with Visual Studio, I opened the sln file in text editor and modified all the paths in the solution to point to my correct directory. You will have this problem if you try to run more than one storefront solution side-by-side. I saved the sln file. Opened my project, all problems solved. To be safe, I renamed my sln and suo files to match my directory name.

I'm fairly new to this storefront thing, so if you have any tips to share, i'm all ears.

4 comments:

tjb said...

So how do you AspDotNetStoreFront so far? Easy enough to skin/tweak the code? We are looking at purchasing.

Unknown said...

Yah, Had the same issue working several ADNSF sites. Every sln file points to the same virtual directory (usually /AspDotNetStoreFront70 for the 7.0.x.x version) , so you end up creating a new virtual directory for each ADNSF site and then modifying the sln file to ensure that it points to the correct ASDNSF site.

IMHO its SOP, how else would the sln know where the web files are???

Unknown said...

ADNSF is like every other product out their, has its pros and cons. Know a lot of companies / people that use and love ADNSF also know several who would not use it if it was the last eCommerce software on the planet.

All boils down to what you want to accomplish and do you have the time / desire to learn ADNSF or budget to hire someone who does.

Web Presence said...

We're a platinum partner ADNSF developer.

ADNSF has been a great platform to develop for. If you're interested in any ecommerce tips and tricks, visit our AspDotNetStorefront blog