I am not really sure where to start on my ML/DNN  journey. I purchased a version of ML/DNN in February of 2008. I actually launched my site the first week of December 2008 and during that time my registration process was broken. So I am sure that I lost a considerable number of sales. Also Google Checkout worked part of the time. I had instances in the same thread where two ASPDNSF ML/DNN suppport techs suggested that I put in two contraditory config settings related to GCO.

I was of the understanding that the new 7.1.2.0 release would solve my registration issues. But it did not and it also broke my GCO again. I just got a patched DLL that has resolved my GCO issue about 6 weeks after my upgrade. During this time I have just totally abandoned a large PPC campaign because of the GCO and Registration issues.

During much of this time, ASPDNSF Support was blaming everything on my highly customized site. For this highly customized results from me setting a Customer Login page in Site Settings and setting a Redirect After Login and Redirect After Registration in the User Options. These are very basic DNN functions, but ASPDNSF got nasty with me and said that they did not support these functions and did not provide on demand support for customers with highly customized sites.

I will say that my implementation of Bruce Chapman's URL Master can be considered somewhat customized. As a blanket statement ASPDNSF says it does not support Human Friendly URLs and if we use tools like URL Master they don't want to support us.

After months of trying to get my registration page to save the ASPDNSF data (it was storing DNN data), we have finally determined that the word Register in the following URL is case sensitive. /ctl/Register/ works but ctl/register/ does not work.

http://www.uncommongames.com/home/ctl/Register/register.aspx?returnurl=%2fdefault.aspx

I made another post on this case sensitivity issue, but if anyone has ideas on this it would be great. What we had to do is take out the setting in URL Master that forces urls to lower case. That seems to have solved all the registration issues.

Now I went back in and added all my Customer Login and Redirect After Login and Redirect After Registration and they all work as well.

So I realize that ASPDNSF Support cannot deal with every possible configuration scenario in DNN. But their lack of understanding about what does work and what does not work with ML/DNN in DNN really causes a lot of rabbit chasing that is very unproductive.

I still have confidence in this product and will continue to make it work for me in the long run. I have too much time and $$ invested to walk away.

To summarize, I am a year into ML/DNN. I have received two updates during that time. Neither of them solved the problems that I anticipated they would and both caused things that were working to break. Support has issued patches for the broken functionality.

At present. I just tried to do an upgrade to DNN 4.9.2 but I am getting this error that has been discussed here.

AspDotNetStorefrontDNNComponents.AspdnsfPortalSettings..cctor() +41

ML/DNN support says they have not tested 4.9.2. It is my understanding that big DNN partners like ASPDNSF should have preview access to new versions so they can test in advance.

Sometimes I get the feeling that ASPDNSF wishes they had never made this move. As far as the outsourced Phiilipine support, they are not too bad. They typically respond in a reasonable amount of time. But I do end up having to explain the same issues over and over before they get it.

I decided to just roll back to DNN 4.9.1 so that I won't get upset when they finally tell me they don't support 4.9.2.

If you want to checkout my site it is at www.uncommongames.com 

If you want to add someting to cart and then try Secure Checkout it should take you to the Customer Login page. There just click the Register button and put in the required info. You shoud repost to the same page with a link to the shopping cart. At that point, click the cart icon and you should show up on the Shipping page. At that point you can just abandon the cart...that is unless you really want to make a purchase.

I would appreciate if a couple of people could do a test registration and provide feedback on the process.

I see this thread with the notice of a pending release in a couple of days.

http://forums.aspdotnetstorefront.com/showthread.php?t=15938

Another issue I have is that ML/DNN overwrites the resource files on every upgrade. I don't like the way they format some of their resource strings on the Registration page so I made some changes that took quite a while. So I was unpleasantly surprised that they were overwritten on the last release.

I enquired with support and they said that was a standard practice and I should have a backup of any files that I customized. Well of course I have a backup. But in the same ticket they also said that they are adding more items to the resource strings for more flexibility. So my question is how can this work. If they add in more items to a new resource file and overwrite my existing file... then how can I restore my backup without overwriting the new items they have added? I realize that I can obviously go back in and make my changes. But it is pretty time consuming and seems a little crazy to have to do that.

Shouldn't they be able to just add in their new items to the existing files? Or at a minimum provide a list of the new items so that I can restore my backup and then copy in the additions. There has to be a better way than the status quo.

I am sure that more will come to mind soon. But I don't want to spend too much time on negative thoughts. But it is important to see what issues people are having and see if as a group we can work to get some positive change in ML/DNN.

I know for sure that I will be pretty hesitant to even install this pending release since I just now got my site back online.

Another oversight by ASPDNSF which should be corrected ASAP. IMO, the easiest way would be to support IPortable, or simply export appConfigs to an xml.config file. Then update the settings the same way the existing mechanism works for product import via xml (add/update). It is a trival task in vb.net to dump and restore settings, and I agree that alll settings can be replaced AS LONG AS they are updateable from a separate stored copy.

I could go on, but I have better things to do. :)