dashCommerce

 "The file '/checkout.aspx' has not been pre-compiled, and cannot be requested"

All other pages work OK and everything works fine on my local development computer.  I think this may be because the SSL certificate is not installed yet. I do get the security warning from IE7 before proceeding.  I wanted to ask now because I don't want to waste time assuming the certificate will take care of it only to find it does not and I wasted valuable debugging time.

Well I figured it out.

Our story begins with, when you sign up for dashCommerce web hosting the site comes preloaded with the dashCommerce application.  Even though I am using my own slightly modified version of DC I left the files there and uploaded my version to a sub domain dev.  It appears that even though I was running in the dev sub domain, when you went to checkout it was trying to load checkout.aspx in root folder.  When I renamed checkout.aspx in the root folder the error changed to 404 resource not found.

Thus I changed the cart::btnCheckout_Click method to: 
 Response.Redirect( ResolveUrl("~/checkout.aspx") );

While I was working on this I had the SSL certificate installed.  But I still could not get to the checkout page and still got the website certificate warning from IE7 and even after clicking proceed to website anyway, it did not work.  I tried to navigate directly to the checkout page and could not get there.   I since found out that SSL certificates do not work with sub domains unless you purchase a wildcard certificate for $200.

So I decided to get away from using a sub domain for the test website and decided instead on taking the temporary, information display only page I had built previously and add it to the project under the name tdefault.aspx.  I made this and the login page the only pages accessible to anonymous users.  Then in the Plesk control panel I changed the first default page to tdefaut.apsx.  Thus if someone types in the domain only they get the temporary page and my beta testers can enter a full URL and get to the login page of the test website.   I did not want to change the name of the default.aspx page in DC, I figured that would be asking for trouble.

Now everything is working  except one little wrinkle, sometimes, not always, when you try to go to the DC default.aspx page you get a 404 resource not found error.  I don’t think I will spend much time debugging this issue.  I assume it will go away when the site goes live and I remove the tdefault page.

Finally I must include a plug for the dashCommerce hosting service, their customer service has been very responsive.