Currently we are working on developing 1.6.2 of Cart Viper, one of the new features we have added is support for the Microsoft Azure platform. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud based hosting service, using Azure you can quickly deploy a DNN website in a matter of minutes.

Starting in release 1.6.2 of Cart Viper you will be able to deploy and run a Cart Viper ecommerce store on DNN that is hosting on Azure Websites. We’ll be creating a video tutorial to help get you started once we release the module.

Adding support for Azure was mainly focused in two area

  • SQL Scripts
  • PDF Generation

SQL Scripts

When using Azure Websites the database used by DNN is the cloud based version of SQL Server called SQL Azure. SQL Azure has some minor differences in supported SQL terms so we have to modify some of our scripts in order to deploy the module.

PDF Generation

We had previously used a third party library which made use of GDI+ to generate the order detail PDFs, on the cloud platform this lead to an out of memory exception. So we have switched to a new rendering which makes use of WPF.

Using Azure to host your DNN ecommerce site is going to be huge, its just so simple, cost effective and scalable. Watch out for the new release of Cart Viper coming soon.