An ASP.NET Shopping Cart and Hosting Service. Writing a shopping cart application is a rite of passage for many ASP.NET programmers, especially those who learned ASP.NET via introductory books and tutorials featuring the shopping cart as the example application. And yet, writing a good shopping cart is hard work, especially as the feature list continues to expand to include customer ratings, nested product categories, wish lists, e-mail alerts, shipping details, e-commerce transaction monitoring, reports ... the list goes on and on.
Reviewing the generic nature of shopping carts, it’s a wonder why Microsoft opted to not include such controls in ASP.NET 2.0. Perhaps the new login controls, role management, master pages, and profiles in the 2.0 release kept the ASP.NET team too busy to tackle shopping cart management — or maybe they decided that such a control is too quickly evolving to encase in a component that would remain part of the ASP.NET 2.0 legacy for years to come. In any case, the folks at IQ Services saw this omission as a perfect opportunity to not only create a sophisticated .NET-based shopping cart application, but also host it as well. Shopping cart data can be stored within either a Microsoft Access or SQL Server database, and the solution can be purchased as a single, stand-alone ASP.NET Web application, hosted by another ASP.NET provider, or hosted and managed by IQ Services. An SDK can also be purchased separately; this is available by request to licensed users and features a Visual Studio.NET C# project demonstrating how to use XSE.NET’s shopping bag user control, as well as execute stored database queries (it also provides the source code to the Authorize.net gateway class used by XSE.NET).
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