AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

1. Has anyone successfully converted to a VS2008 Web Application Project and if so, is there a list of hints or steps?

2. More to the point, is there any detailed information on how the custom Asp.net Membership Provider is different from the out-of-the-box MS Membership Provider. I have read in several posts how "the original Membership Provider was too limiting" and how "everything was serialized", but this does not provide a lot of information for those of us who want to integrate to an existing Web Application Project (note the Web App Project does NOT use the standard Profile but a replacement WebProfile object).

It would seem that integration would involve: 1) mapping existing user properties/fields so that a user object between an existing Web App Project and the AbleCommerce Web Site Project is identical, and 2) passing or maintaining a session object or authenticated user status back and forth.

Any suggestions? or hints? or even detailed instructions?

dalej wrote:2. More to the point, is there any detailed information on how the custom Asp.net Membership Provider is different from the out-of-the-box MS Membership Provider. I have read in several posts how "the original Membership Provider was too limiting" and how "everything was serialized"

? I don't think the issue is that the out of the box membership provider was too limiting. Our issue was that we wanted to map to our own tables and fields. This was the driving factor in implementing a custom provider.

FYI - source to all the membership providers is included in the source code package.

That is understandable. Although the MS implementation does work with most any field, it is very awkward to try to then use these in any SQL.

But to the point of the question, it would seem that this type of integration would be one of THE biggest tasks when implementing AC into an existing site. For example, you have a user logged into an existing site and the user then decides to purchase something through the shopping cart. As a programmer, you will have to maintain session/state between an SSL and non-SSL URLs, maintain authentication and possibly even pass the user's choice of item being purchased. Couple this with the situation where there is no user authenticated yet (anonymous profile) and these have to be maintained several times going back and forth between the existing site and the Able shopping cart.

The first step in tackling these problems would be to compare the MS Membership provider code and schema with the Able Membership provider. It would make sense that there is some documentaion, help file or "bridge" code that has been developed already. This cannot be a unique problem.

Is there anything out there?

ps it seems the common answer I get to questions is "the source is available for purchase". While that appears to be necessary, it would be nice to get some advice as well.