Updating to the latest version

The West Wind Web Store is an application that is meant to be customized heavily. This means that if you plan on moving to newer versions it can sometimes be difficult to get an existing version updated to the latest version.

The Web Store is based on solid Object Oriented principles so if you stayed with subclassing existing functionality you should have an easy time moving your changes to this updated version. The store consists of two major parts:

The Web Store e-Commerce front end
The business framework underneath it

Typically the e-Commerce portion is heavily modified by you the customer, while the base functionality is generally left alone or systematically enhanced through subclassing.

BEFORE UPDATING PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU BACK UP!
This means your database, your ASPX pages and code.

In any case here are the steps for updating.

Update the Web Store Data
The installation includes a DataTemplates directory. In this directory files are provided for updating the Web Store database from version 1.0 to 1.1, 1.2 and then to 1.3. If you've made changes to the structure of your tables - specifically to some of the existing fields - they may be overwritten. Any new fields you added will not be touched.

Update the code
If you've made changes to the store, hopefully those changes have been isolated into separate classes and source files, that are easily identifiable. The easiest way to do this tends to be subclassing into new classes stored into a separate directory if possible. For somethings (like the ASPX UI pages) however this likely was not possible, so there will be some pain synchronizing to the new version. However, the changes to the UI portion of the store are relatively minor so existing pages should continue work even if you modified them heavily.

The same applies to the framework classes. The changes have been minor and are unlikely to affect the behavior of existing applications. If you didn't modify the framework classes then there will likely be few problems. There are a few changed signatures - those should show up right away in compilation. Again, if you isolated your changes into subclasses they will continue to work with the newer version.

If you heavily modified we'd highly recommend that you install this new version into a separate directory and then move your modifications into this new installation. In either case, make sure you create a backup before making any changes to existing code.