AC7 & Visual Studio 2008?

Intelliflex · Post by **Intelliflex** » Mon Dec 17, 2007 6:31 pm

Good Day All...

Does anyone have any experience with AC7 and Visual Studio 2008? In VS2008, you can currently choose whether to use .NET 2.0 - 3.5, so it one could assume this may work if 2.0 platform is choosen?

Any thoughts?

Dave

AbleMods · Post by **AbleMods** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 6:09 am

I'm dying to get into the VS2008 beta 2, but I'm too chicken. I can't afford for it to blow something up I can't fix.

Is it pretty solid now for production development?

NC Software · Post by **NC Software** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 6:47 am

Visual Studio and .NET 3.5 are phenominal!! You can get your feet wet with the express editions, now available.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/product/default.aspx

Intelliflex · Post by **Intelliflex** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 8:43 am

If you get the Microsoft MSDN subscription or become a partner and subscribe to a qualifying program, you can get the VS2008 now, as it's been available there for a while. We have have been using it for a while now and Neal is right, you'll love the enhancements.

A few of the component vendors won't have upgraded components available till the first quarter, but most of the 3rd party .NET 2.0 components can be used if the project is set to use the 2.0 platform.

Dave

NC Software · Post by **NC Software** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 8:51 am

The question though as to whether AC7 will work in VS 2008 is still open. I don't have the source yet, but due to the fact that AC7 uses WSE 3.0/WS-* (due to payment processor integrations) VS 2008 is NOT compatible with WSE. We recently had to move all of our web services to WCF (Windows Communication Foundation) due to the fact VS 2008 does not support WSE.

What AC could do is create those specific payment processors in VS 2005, create the assemblies that are referenced in VS 2008 and then you could use VS 2008 I presume. So long as no WSE references are required in any of your projects.

I would very much like to see AC7 built in VS 2008/.NET 3.5 as there are bug fixes, improvements in the framework, etc. I know on the Winforms side there were quite a few that we were directly affected by that are now fixed - thank you Microsoft!

Intelliflex · Post by **Intelliflex** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 9:18 am

Neal,

I found this on WSE 3.0 in Microsoft forum...

WSE 3.0 is not supported in VS 2008. This would require a Service Pack to be released for WSE and currently the WSE team has no future Service Packs planned.

The question then stands, what do developers do. I'll answer your questions above and hopefully that might help a bit:

1. Currently no, there is no supported way of doing this. VS 2008 just released and WSE 3.0 released a while back. Is there anything in particular that you use in the configuration tool? Everything that is done through the configuration tool can be done manually by updating your web.config file.

2. Re-reading your WSE used to work with "Add Web Reference" in VS 2005. However, under the covers, what is really happning is that wsdl.exe is being run against the service's wsdl, and the base class changes from SoapHttpProtocol to WebServicesClientProtocol. So that's all you have to do:

a) Run wsdl.exe against the service's wsdl file

b) Change the base class that your proxy inherits from, from SoapHttpClientProtocol to WebServicesClientProtocol

WSE 3.0 does not have any future releases planned and people should really be thinking about upgrading their stack to WCF. Migration from WSE to WCF isn't all that difficult and there is literature to help with that. You can find out more about WCF at http://www.netfx3.com.

If there are any specific questions regarding migration that you want to ask, please let me know.

Thanks,

Sidd [MSFT]

NC Software · Post by **NC Software** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 9:33 am

Maybe I wasn't clear, but thanks for the info, we have moved everything to WCF. It was a great switch, WCF is well done, and not that hard to learn. Here are a few links to help anyone interested in learning WCF:

15 web casts (not really needed, but I am really into this WCF now!)

http://www.dasblonde.net/2007/06/24/WCF ... eries.aspx

Get this book: Learning WCF (by the same author as the web casts)

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0596101627 ... KSCXM99E82

More info:

http://www.thatindigogirl.com/

WCF has performance improvements over ASMX web services, here is an article you may want to read:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310550.aspx

Regarding AC7, I corresponded with AC (Logan) and the problem is not on the AC side, it's the payment processors that use WSE. You can easily convert ASMX to WCF by adding the service and operation contracts in the attribute sections, Google "Convert ASMX to WCF" if you need more info.

So again, we are full up using WCF and love it, and do see the performance improvement as we use quite a bit of Mtom encoding for our binary serialization. The Mtom "streamed" system is also fantastic, far easier than it was to implement in ASMX/WSE/WS-*.

Microsoft did a great job with WCF, it was a pleasure migrating to and not hard to understand. The nice thing is you can do this completely without WSDL if you own both sides, service and client due to access to your Interface directly.

Post by **Logan Rhodehamel** » Tue Dec 18, 2007 3:51 pm

NC Software wrote:What AC could do is create those specific payment processors in VS 2005, create the assemblies that are referenced in VS 2008 and then you could use VS 2008 I presume. So long as no WSE references are required in any of your projects.

We reference some third party DLLs that use WSE3. We don't reference WSE3 directly.

Also, those processors are separate projects - remember how you wondered why we have so many DLLs? Sounds like this is a good side benefit. You don't have to recompile the payment processors to recompile AC7.

Intelliflex · Post by **Intelliflex** » Wed Dec 19, 2007 6:58 pm

Logan

So does that mean that using VS2008 may be possible? If not, what needs to happen to use it instead of VS 2005?

Thanks,

Dave

Post by **Logan Rhodehamel** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 9:50 am

Intelliflex wrote:So does that mean that using VS2008 may be possible? If not, what needs to happen to use it instead of VS 2005?

I'm sure it is possible. We don't intend to stick with 2005 forever. It's just that all of our resources are assigned to tasks right now, and I can't afford to investigate this until maybe Jan/Feb. That's why I can't give a definitive answer, what challenges there would be, etc.

Neal brought up WSE, but I do not think that is a factor for the main CommerceBuilder project. None of our projects reference WSE directly. The specific payment integrations (e.g. CyberSource) are all individual VS projects, and they only reference WSE indirectly via third party APIs produced by the vendor.

Intelliflex · Post by **Intelliflex** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:09 am

Logan

Just to know it's on the schedule for the first part of 2008 is good.

Is RC2 getting close? (it's Christmas time you know...)

Dave

Post by **Shopping Cart Admin** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:25 am

Hello Dave,

We are shooting for January 4th. We released our previous builds too quickly before anyone had a chance to really get any time into them and find any issues. We have corrected virtually all known issues and the next release will be a nice solid final build!

AbleMods · Post by **AbleMods** » Thu Dec 20, 2007 5:45 pm

<HIGH>