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What's New in the Adventure Works Cycles Storefront
The following changes are in this version (Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005) of Adventure Works Cycles Storefront:
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The "Also Bought" upsell control is enhanced to use an OLAP query when OLAP available.
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The storefront has been enhanced to provide backend processing of orders. Once this feature is enabled
in the web.config file, when an order is submitted
by the user online, processes such as inventory checking, manufacturing, purchasing and shipping happen
asynchronously
in the backend to fulfill the order using Service Broker. See the readme_orderingservice.htm file in the
installation directory of the Storefront sample for more details.
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All tiers have been upgraded to match the latest Adventure Works Cycles schema, including
the new use of several named schemas within the database.
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ASP.NET 2.0 technology has been incorporated into the sample including adding a master page,
using the login control, and adding a connectionStrings section to the web.config file.
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Ship to and bill to addresses as well as carrier information is collected during checkout.
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Users can sign up for Adventure Works newsletters and update their customer profile information.
Adventure Works SchemaThe Adventure Works schema contains tables which represent key business
aspects of many small, medium, and enterprise scale manufacturing and sales operations. A comprehensive diagram
of these tables and their relationships is contained in this schema diagram. The
schema contains tables for the following business functions:
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Sales force automation and analysis
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Customer relationship management
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Human resources
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Purchasing/Vendor (electronic data interchange)
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External facing Web site (Internet)
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Internal facing Web site (Intranet)
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Manufacturing workflow
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Engineering document management
The following changes were made a previous version of the Adventure Works Cycles Storefront:
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A page which gathers demographics during the registration process has been added, along with the infrastructure to store the demographics
data into the database. See the Demographics Page
for more details.
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A problem with displaying the user name on the home page has been corrected when the user's name contains
certain unicode characters. The problem has been solved by BASE64 encoding the user's name before it
is stored in a cookie, and also decoding the cookie prior to display. See login.aspx
and default.aspx for implementation details.
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A small WinForms sample application named "ReviewWatcher" is now available. This sample application demonstrates how to
use the SqlDependency class to register and process query notifications. Query notifications are a way
for a client application to receive an event when a database table has changed in Microsoft SQL Server.
See Using Query Notifications
for more details.
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The sample application has been ported to Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET 2005. As part of this
porting process
the tree control for product categories and subcategories are changed from
an add-in tree control to one that ships as part of the 2.0 version of ASP.NET.
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The Currency user defined type and the ConvertCurrency user defined function are
introduced to move some of the globalization and localization functionality to the server.
The type and function are both implemented as managed (C#) code, and are loaded into and execute
as part of Microsoft SQL Server. This is a new capability and was not available in previous
releases of Microsoft SQL Server.
- Adjustment of tables which have rowguids to match what is required for the replication sample, and removal of
the ModifiedDate column. These changes simplify the schema, and
reduce the disk footprint for each record, thus improving performance.
- Changed the identity columns of type tinyint to int. This is required to support replication scenarios.
- The reorganization of contact information for employees, vendors,
wholesale customers (stores), and retail customers (individuals). This change provides significantly
better normalization and consistency across these areas of the schema.
- The removal of the ProductDescriptionXLocale table. This change removes some complexity from
the schema which makes it easier to understand and use. The same localization of content is still
provided for the product descriptions through the ProductModelXProductDescriptionXLocale table.
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The renaming of the ShoppingCart table to ShoppingCartItem. This is done because the table contains
items in various shopping carts rather than just a list of shopping carts.
Port to Visual Studio .NET 2005
The Adventure
Works Cycles Storefront was changed to use the tree control that
is provided as part of the standard ASP.NET library included in the .NET Framework 2.0. See the
Menu user control
for more information. Note that, you will need
the .NET Framework runtime (which is included with Microsoft SQL Server 2005) in order to run the sample.
You will also need Visual Studio .NET 2005 to browse solutions, compile, or
debug this version of the sample.
Currency User-defined Type and ConvertCurrency User-defined Function
A Currency class and user-defined type were introduced into the Adventure Works Cycles Storefront along with
a ConvertCurrency method and user-defined function. The type and function are used on the server to
greatly simplify the code that handles the conversion of one form of currency to another, and
the correct rendering of that currency using the appropriate currency symbol. This part of the sample
demonstrates how you can write managed code and register that managed code with the server so that it can
be used in server-side data processing. Careful use of this feature of Microsoft SQL Server 2005
can greatly increase the power of user-defined types, functions, and stored procedures, and simplify the
interfaces between the middle and data tiers of your application. It is also possible to greatly improve
the performance of your applications using these techniques. See
Server Side Managed Types and Functions
for more details.
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