Building Solutions with Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 (Pro-Developer) (Paperback)

~ (Author), Derek Armentrout (Author) "Commerce Web sites were once considered the great frontier of untapped profit and potential..." (more)
Key Phrases: shopping basket page, user detail page, billing address page, Business Desk, Fourth Coffee, Active Directory (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Learn how to use Microsoft® Commerce Server 2002, Microsoft Content Management Server 2002, and Microsoft Application Center to build a comprehensive, secure e-commerce solution.

Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Microsoft Press; 1 edition (March 26, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0735618542
• ISBN-13: 978-0735618541
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,263,241 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent CS2002 book for developers, May 30, 2003

By	Jake Peterson (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This is one of the best books I've read on any of the Microsoft servers. Unlike a lot of books, it focuses on how to develop a site using CS2002, instead of focusing on the features of the platform. The examples in the book apply to both B2C and B2B, so I'd recommend it for any development effort with CS. I found the C# and ASP.NET code samples very useful and have already used a lot of the code in sites I am working on. And it's a relief to find a Commerce Server book that doesn't spend all its time on the solution sites - this one has a little intro to them, but then gets right into developing a custom site, including creating administrative interfaces from scratch or by customizing the BizDesk. One caution - the book doesn't have a lot on installing or administering Commerce Server, but I think the help file works fine for that. Buy this book when you're ready to go beyond the simple install of the Retail site and start writing code.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book, but buggy, incomplete, and weak sample site, July 25, 2004

By	D. Colasanti (Syracuse, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The book is solid, reads well, and is decently edited as most MS Press books are. It's a good book (worthy of 4 stars) that would be great (5 stars) if it had a large and well-detailed appendix on the Commerce Server object model. Well, that would be the case if the source code worked or if MS Press had a decent book support website, but it doesn't and they don't, which is why I rated the book 3 stars.

The code is buggy which cause parts of it not to work. Even if you fix those bugs, there are still broken links on the site and incorrect object model references, the site is not complete (where is the real payment info? where is the cross/up-selling?), and the site design was an obvious afterthought (for example, the buyer has to specify who to send each item to as she adds it to her shopping cart!). Part of the site doesn't function properly until you register and sign-in! I realize it was intended to be an incomplete sample site, but a serious text needs a solid *working* example site that had some thought put into it.

Strangely, there must be a good copy of the source on one of the author's hard drives, because some of the features that produce error pages (like viewing the shopping cart) actually are displayed properly inside the book. Hmmm.

I got the source code from the MS Press site, so I can only believe that it's the latest code. There is no errata for this book on the MS Press site (odd for a book that was published over a year ago), and there is no apparent way to contact the authors for the updated source or errata (nor could I google-up any updates).

These problems greatly detract from an otherwise excellent book. If you want to read about commerce server and how it works, buy it. If you're looking for a working sample site to learn from, you won't find one here. Too bad since I am unaware of any Commerce Server 2002 book with a working sample site.

I would think that MS Press put out this book in hopes of selling Commerce Server 2002 to developers. If that's really their intent, then they need (1) to fix the sample in this book, (2) make a better support website for MS Press, (3) come up with a better CS pricing structure for small businesses, and (4) make it easier to deploy in a shared hosting environment.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?, April 9, 2003

By A Customer

After going through all the labs prepared by Microsoft on MCS 2002 and MCMS 2002, I dove into this book. Here are my findings:

DO NOT buy this book if you are looking for a "how to", or if you are a newbie to MCS and MCMS.
This book explains items found in MCS and painfully briefly on MCMS (one chapter), it glosses over the 'how to' and expects that you already know that.

DO buy this book if you already know a good portion of how to manage and configure CS and MCMS, then this book would do a good job of providing more details above and beyond what is provided in Microsofts documentation.

The book is exactly this - "which comes first, the chicken or the egg", because it expects you to know how to manage and configure, yet by the time I get to that level of expertise, there ain't no way I would buy this book because it wouldn't help me.