Commerce Server R2
August 29, 2011 | 
Author Last week, Commerce Server 2009 R2 is included in MSDN subscription downloads, that means soon the product is going to hit RTM. If you have MSDN subscription then you can download the software under servers section (as shown below).
What next (expectation from the community)?
- Commerce server help on MSDN
- Separate forums for R2.
- Commerce server roadmap
- Commerce server videos in channel 9.
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I still remember the last commerce server road map released few years before and after that there is no official commerce server roadmap released. As published before, commerce server team has come up with CS2009 and also enhancement release (R2). With the delay in new roadmap, many of the existing commerce server customers & new customers who are willing to leverage commerce server are in jeopardy whether to continue to use this product or not. As usual, rumors are on the fly; they say commerce server as a product will be stopped or commerce server will be integrated & sold with other products, etc. These rumors are not official published by Microsoft rather the insecurity or not awareness of future CS product features have make these rumors to flow in the industry.
Just want to pass this to the community that existing Commerce Server customers started thinking to move to R2, which is a minor release. 3 Key areas are addressed:
• Ease of installation and deployment
• Improved business tools for managing product catalogues
• N-Tier deployments for separating the logical functions of an e-commerce solution onto separate hardware
In R2, there are very limited changes/improvements concerning integration with SharePoint and as as usual there are no enhancements to the core commerce server subsystems. Note: the licensing model is yet to published by the product team.
R2 release is currently in RC and will be released to market in 2nd half of 2011 (may be 1-3 months down the line). I received communication from Commerce Server product team that they will publish the road map after R2 release and they already started working on the roadmap items. They don’t want to disclose roadmap before R2 release keeping extreme caution in competitive situations. So friends, urge you not to believe the rumors and just wait for couple of months to know how future CS product looks like. If you still have questions & want to clarify before you opt this product then I would recommend you to directly work with Microsoft sales team and they can give you insight into roadmap (under NDA)
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All CS developers know that commerce server extensively uses cache to store frequently used data to scale up the application performance. CS2009 R2 inculcate same features plus few more that will help us to manage the cache effectively. This article will provide an overview of caching and in next articles we will go in depth on this topic.
CS2009 R2 supports two types of caching modes
- Push
- Pull
Push is old mechanism and still supported in R2 which can be ideally be configured in two tier architecture where presentation layer & application layer resides in the same box. R2 supports three tier architecture, so possibility of cache enabling at presentation layer and application layer. So, there is a need to get data refreshed in regular intervals of time in both layers. We have to use Pull cache mechanism where the server takes responsibility of refreshing its cache if it is out dated. Since Pull is supported in two tier & three tier topology, Microsoft strongly recommends this for cache refresh mechanism.
Note: Push or Pull mechanism can refresh data only. For any schema related refresh you need perform IISReset.
On the application tier, the Commerce Foundation operation service queries for cache refresh requests at the interval specified in configuration and clears any affected caches. On the presentation-tier, the Web application polls the connected Commerce Foundation operation service for pending cache refresh requests at the interval specified in configuration and clears the affected local caches(click here to know CS2009 R2 architecture) . Subsequent data requests refill the cache with the latest information from the database. As a developer/support analyst, you need to consider following best practices when you enable caching.
- The time on all servers to be synchronized.
- The cache refresh pooling interval should be same in all servers.
Now lets see how can you configure refresh pooling internal (pull). In your configuration file (web.config/app.config) , you can have a section for cache (as shown below)
|
<microsoft.commerce> |
Enabled attribute signifies whether to enable cache or not (default value is false). The pollinginterval is the interval in seconds at which both the presentation tier and the Foundation OperationService poll for cache refresh requests. This value can be from 1 to 86400 (default is 30) and any number not within this range will throw System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorException. Be careful while you set this value. A high value will make the servers to have absolute data in their cache and small value will make frequent cache refresh thus using more system resources (instead of gaining performance, we started loosing performance).
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After R2 installation & configuration on existing CS server, if you try to open the application, you may get exceptions. One of the reason is that in R2, there are many changes happen to the existing API namespaces. This leads to ample amount of work for the developer if you want to migrate to the new R2 platform. If you are running the web parts provided by commerce server then your migration is simple and easy. To do this, you need to execute “SharePoint Commerce Services Configuration wizard” and below steps will help you to do easy migration.
Note: Click here to view the steps to create commerce server SharePoint website.
Step 1: Go to Start –> All Programs –> Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 R2-> Tools –> SharePoint Commerce Services Configuration Wizard.exe. The wizard opens and it does system dependency check. If any failure occurs, you can’t proceed next. Click on Next button if all dependency checks are passed.
Step 2: In this section, you need to enable the check box – “Upgrade Web Parts only (existing web parts will be replaced). The other options are same as old wizard and helps you to deploy new solution in SharePoint.
On Click of Next button, you will see a warning, which says “The wizard has detected that you have Commerce Server web parts installed on the system. Deploying the selected SharePoint solution will result in an upgrade of the web parts. Do you want to proceed?”. Click Yes button.
Step 3: That’s it, the wizard executes and in few seconds you will see the final page where it shows the existing solution is migrated.
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Commerce server DEV team has created a new tool which will help us to migrate existing commerce server site 2009 site configuration files (only ChannelConfiguration.xml & Metadata.xml) to commerce server 2009 R2. Note: This tool will not migrate the code and If you are planning to migrate either Commerce server 2002 or CommerceServer 2009 sites then you have to do it manually.
The tool name is Site Migration Tool and follow below steps to migrate your existing Cs2009 site.
Step 1: Start –> All Programs –> Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 R2 –> tools –> Site Migration Tool. Welcome screen appears. Click to initiate Commerce Server Web site detection.
Step 2: After processing all the files, the tool lists down available commerce server site sites . You can opt to migrate or not to migrate by checking or unchecking the check boxes.
The Site Migration Wizard creates a backup copy of each configuration file for selected sites before beginning the migration file. So, we need mention a directory name in the first directory. The Site Migration Wizard creates a separate folder and log file for each migrated site and you can provide the path in the second text box (in the above diagram both backup and log locations are auto-populated).
Some times you may get following exception. “The web Parts SharePoint solution must be upgraded to the current Commerce Server SharePoint Services version before configuration files can be migrated. This applies to the following SharePoint web sites.”. if you encounter this exception, you can’t proceed further. Check my other blog which will help you to migrate existing web parts to new version.
Step 3: The next screen shows the summary of items you have selected in previous slide. Press Next button to change the configuration files.
Step 4: This is final step and show the migration results.
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