So far, I’ve installed three (3) open source shopping carts; PrestaShop, OpenCart, and TomatoCart. All of these packages have been developed with PHP and MySQL technologies. This morning I’ve decided to see if there are any open source ecommerce packages written in a Microsoft .NET environment.

My first search lead me to the Microsoft Web Gallery. From there, I found nopCommerce. It looks like a reasonable package, so I’ve decided to install it and see what it looks like.

I wanted to first look at the documentation, however, it’s not free! I decided to download the product and install it anyway. I have two (2) choices for installing. The first way is to use the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. The second way is to manually download and install it. I’m choosing the latter, as I want to be sure to get the complete package with source code.

I then navigated to the nopCommerce download page, downloaded the latest release (v1.90 at the time of this writing) and extracted the Visual Studio solution to my development workstation. I opened the solution with Visual Studio, and realized that I didn’t “unblock” the downloaded zip file prior to extracting the solution to my hard drive. So I deleted the solution files, used Microsoft file explorer to change the properties to “Unblock” the zip file prior to extracting the files. I then re-extracted the files to my development environment and re-opened project with Visual Studio 2010. Much better now! No security warnings.

Next, I rebuilt the application and after verifying that it executed a clean build, I took the contents of the “NopCommerceStore” folder and copied to the “www\nopCommerce” folder on my development Web Server. I then added the new application using IIS7 Manager, and binded it to port 8004. I then opened the server’s firewall port.

I browsed to the nopCommerce Web Site, and immediately got the following error:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Unrecognized attribute ‘targetFramework’. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive.

Source Error:

 
Line 26: <error statusCode="404" redirect="filenotfound.htm"/>
Line 27: </customErrors>
Line 28: <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0">
Line 29: <expressionBuilders>
Line 30: <add expressionPrefix="NopResources"type="NopSolutions.NopCommerce.
BusinessLogic.Localization.NopResourceExpressionBuilder, Nop.BusinessLogic"/>

Source File: C:\Data\www\nopCommerce\web.config    Line: 28

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.4206; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.4209

My initial thoughts were that the Application Pool wasn’t set to the proper .NET Framework, so I used IIS7 Manager and changed it from .NET Framework v2.0.50727 to v4.0.30319. I then restarted the Application Pool, and the application is now loading fine.

I followed the installation instructions, and created a new Microsoft SQL Server schema and user. The only problem I encountered here was that I forgot to include the database instance name in the SQL Server name field. The format is “SERVER\INSTANCENAME”. Other than that, the installation process was a breeze.

After the installation was complete, I was able to browse to the home page and log into the application. From there, I was able to get into the administration section and begin configuring it.

I next renamed the existing “robots.txt” to “robots.txt.orig” and replaced it with the following to prevent spidering of my demo site:

# go away
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

I’ll keep updating this post as I continue exploring nopCommerce.

You’re welcome to visit my nopCommerce demo site here. It will be up and running while I’m developing at my desk during the day. If you would like help with your installation, just get in contact with me. I’m always happy to help out!

Updates:

One of the first modification that I did was to download the Five colour theme pack for front-end themes. To install the themes, simply extract the files from the download and drop them into the “APP_Themes” folder.