.NET Pet Shop 4 on MSDN

Congratulations to the Pet Shop team! The .NET Pet Shop 4.0 article and code base has been published on MSDN!

For those not familiar with the .NET Pet Shop, it is a sample application that shows the best practices for building an enterprise application using the .NET framework. The .NET Pet Shop features common e-commerce scenarios such as browsing for items, maintaining a shopping cart, checking out, and keeping track of user accounts.

With .NET Pet Shop 4.0, we did a complete user interface re-design from version 3.0 that take advantage of many of the new controls and features ASP.NET 2.0 provides including: Master Pages, Themes, Wizard control, Membership and Profile. Along with a user interface face-lift, Pet Shop 4.0 introduces a wishlist and asynchronous order processing. For further details, check out .NET Pet Shop 4 article on MSDN.

Please feel free to leave comments and questions on this blog entry and don't forget to rate the article.

- Alan

Enabling Remote Connections to SQL Server Express

By default, SQL Server Express will only allow connecting from a local client. To enable remote connections, there are two settings to change:

1) First, select the properties of the SQL Server Express instance within Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and make sure that "allow remote connections to this server is checked".

2) Now open the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration tool and change the remote connections to allow both local and remote connections.