You may have been worried about me since I haven’t posted anything since Sueetie v3.1 was released a week ago. Sorry about that, but I’m still on the job. I was busy converting Sueetie Markeplace from a Website Project to a Web Application, integrating it in the Sueetie Framework, and revamping its SQL Schema. The new Sueetie Marketplace is online at http://sueetie.com/marketplace.
I needed to spend some quality time with Sueetie Marketplace because I’ll be using it to distribute Product Keys for the new Triple Scoop products in Version 3.1, the Addon Pack and Sueetie Analytics. I was not going to spin out more code for Marketplace in its original form.
For those who know Sueetie History, Sueetie Marketplace actually started out as the ASPNET Classifieds Site Starter Kit. I always felt it had great features, and with a little initial customization, it’s been doing a fantastic job serving up Sueetie downloads for over two years now.
As I mentioned, the original form of Sueetie Marketplace was a Website project. Website projects aren’t bad. After all, BlogEngine.NET is still being distributed as a Website application. No, Sueetie Marketplace’s kiss of death for continued viability was its Visual Studio-generated DataSet Data Access Layer. “Generated by a tool.” You may have encountered this application design before.
My motto is, the only tool that’s going to generate my DAL is CodeSmith. So yeah, the Marketplace Data Access Layer is now Provider-based, like every other Sueetie application. The DataSet xsd schema DAL is dead.
You can see the former Marketplace website project in the above screenshot at left. Here is the location of the new version’s root directory files, with full Sueetie theme integration and CodeBehind in the Sueetie.Commerce project library which drives the new Sueetie Marketplace.
There’s little difference on the Marketplace Page for the moment, but one of the improvements you’ll see is that the ASPNET GridView controls have been replaced with jQuery DataTables.NET.
The original Sueetie Marketplace/Classifieds Starter Kit had it’s own Admin area. Once again, it did everything we needed it to do. We’re going to need it to start doing a lot more, however, so Marketplace Administration is now part of Sueetie Administration.
I’ll be adding more administrative functions very shortly. For now, here’s a look at the Manage Categories page. While multi-tiered categories are not on display at Sueetie.com, the beefy category handling has always been one of my favorite features of the app.
That’s all we’ll cover for today. I wanted to make sure you knew I was still on the job and to introduce you to what you’ll be seeing in Sueetie Version 3.2!