We decided to go ahead and put the "smart" in Smart Client and use ClickOnce deployment for the business tools of Commerce Server in order to make initial deployment and future updates to the client machines easier. In short a good idea which unfortunately met a speed bump due to the fact that we're deploying the business tools from the source code and not the compiled version shipping with Commerce Server 2007.

Basically everything went fine until we got to the Customer and Orders Manager which just didn't work. Every time we ran the ClickOnce installer locally or remotely we would get a SecurityException telling us that we didn't have FileIOPermission. Additionally Visual Studio reported that various assemblies didn't allow access to partially trusted assemblies. Baffled we started debugging. New certificates, strong naming assemblies, various ClickOnce deployment modes, changing trust levels for ClickOnce, etc. etc..

In the end the clue that helped us in the right direction was a warning in Visual Studio saying, "Invalid value for 'TargetZone' of item 'LocalComputer'.". Searching through the entire solution yielded nothing. Finally we used a text editor and opened up the .csproj file for Customer and Orders Manager project to have a look at the actual XML of the file. Lo and behold an element called <TargetZone> was defined with the value LocalComputer. Removing the element altogether and redeployed fixed the problem.

I'm assuming that the <TargetZone> element in the csproj file is a leftover from a partial trust deployment setting. Interestingly enough it turns out that this element is defined in the Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 Partner SDK source code distributed by Microsoft which means that everybody trying to do a ClickOnce deployment of Customer and Orders Manager from the supplied source code will encounter the same issue as we did.

Other than this issue configuring the business tools for ClickOnce deployment is a snap I think our client will be very pleased with this particular deployment model.

First we had a Mac guy saying positive things about Windows Vista and now ... the Mac browser Safari is being released for the Windows platform. It must be a cold day in hell indeed :) There's a news story on the unveiling at WWDC on Computerworld.

In all seriousness it's a nice move from Apple because we can now test our web applications in the Safari browser without actually going out a buying a Mac computer. We are looking at a public beta 3 of the product and as such it exhibits a number of problems but the overall experience is definitely there. In the 45 seconds I spent testing it I came across two glaring bugs: The H1 tag is not rendered when running with 120 DPI in Windows (screenshot below) and clicking the bookmarks button crashes the browser. I checked with a colleague and it works in his machine leading me to believe that the issue is related to my 120 DPI setting also.

Performance-wise I'm pretty impressed with Safari it renders pages very quickly, about the same as the latest beta of Firefox 3 called Gran Paradiso, and of course notably quicker than IE7 which is just dog slow on my current development box.

David Messner gave a talk on Commerce Server 2007 architecture at TechEd 2007 Orlando. I didn't think too much of it when I saw that he had posted his slides to the Commerce Server Team blog because the slides are usually worthless without the actual presenter going through them. I was however pleasantly surprised to find that he had actually put some effort into adapting the slides to a PDF making the content very useful to those us not fortunate enough to be a TechEd Orlando.

Take a gander at the Commerce Server 2007 Architecture PDF on the Commerce Server Team blog. I believe that this is required reading for anybody working with Commerce Server.

 I'm probably getting not getting enough sleep when I find something like this funny:

It was actually trying to say:

Earlier this year there were some rumblings that a .NET usergroup would be started in Århus, Denmark. Nothing ever came out of it but this time around I do think that we have something. Quite spontaneously too by the looks of it.

If you are at all interested in talking to like-minded .NETers now would be a good time to show up for some community service :)

The date is set for June 20th 1900 at Hostnordic A/S, Åhavevej 5, 8260 Viby J.. A couple of guys from Vertica will definitly be in attendence, myself included. If you're thinking about attending go and post about in the ActiveDeveloper forum or leave a comment at Vadstrup.dk.

UPDATE: There's an attendee list up at Vadstrup.dk.

Yes I know it's not related to .NET but they were just too cute not to post :) An entire photoset on Flickr of tiny little animals on fingers.

Tiny Animals on Fingers.

Developing web pages requires testing in multiple browser version. Unfortunately Microsoft doens't make it easy to have multiple version of Internet Explorer installed side by side. Luckily TredoSoft has just the thing: Multiple IE Installer.

My favorite blog posting tool Windows Live Writer has been given quite the upgrade both visually and feature-wise. I'm not too sure that I like the new UI but then again I'm a creature of habit so it'll probably grow on me. It's diffinitely got the Vista feel to it which doesn't blend too well with Windows XP which I'm still using at work. One feature I've been missing in the old version was the ability to add new categories; granted I don't do it every day but still it's nice not to have to go the actual website and update the post after posting.

I ran into a pretty weird problem with the Commerce Server 2007 web services and Business User Applications. So much so that I wanted to write a quick note about it. Basically what we were seeing was that the Windows applications couldn't access the web services but we were able to get through to them using the browser. Notably the problem existed both when accessing the service via SSL and without. Further investigation showed that the problem happened on multiple development environments here. Weirdly enough the problem only existed with the Customers and Orders Manager tool the other tools were unaffected even when running with SSL.

Here's the error message which doesn't really tell us anything at all:

A couple of hours of debugging and fiddling around with Fiddler showed that installing the certificate created by SelfSSL.exe fixed the problem but I can't for the life of me explain why that is the case.

The steps I went through to actually install the certificate are as follows:

1) Navigate to the URL of the web service in Internet Explorer 7.

2) Click the red Certificate Error button and from the the View Certificates link.

3) Click the Install Certificate button on the Certificate window.

4) A dialog called Certificate Import Wizard will pop up click Next on the next two screens and finally Finish.

That's it. Hopefully the Business Tools should be able to communicate with the server now.