PayPal Website Payments Pro in Australia

December 30, 2005 at 2:48 am | In Technology | 4 Comments

I’ve been doing a bit of research lately into how to accept payments on an Australian-run business website. In particular, I’ve been playing with the shiny ASP.NET 2.0 PayPal-enabled Commerce Starter Kit (CSK for short).

If you’re interested in seeing what you can do with the Commerce Starter Kit, they have an online demo. It uses the PayPal Sandbox – which means that it looks and works the same as the real PayPal, but no real money ever changes hands.

I knew that PayPal “existed”, but I had never actually looked at how it worked or what was possible. I’ve developed websites in the past with a credit-card processor and a merchant bank account gateway – it’s an experience that wasn’t all that pleasurable. PayPal seems to take the pain (and the $$ overheads) out of that.

The state of WebSite Payments Pro in Australia

PayPal’s offers developers an API to integrate your site’s shopping cart to it’s payment facilities. Website Payments Standard is available in Australia, but this means that a customer is redirected to a co-branded PayPal site to enter in their billing details then redirected back to your site once the transaction is complete.

Website Payments Pro (WPP) is not available in Australia yet and they don’t have an estimated time. WPP allows a developer to interact with PayPal’s WebServices API so that the customer stays on your site the whole time. The Commerce Starter Kit demo shows this mode.

The alternatives

There doesn’t seem to be a comparable alternative for Australian businesses yet. If you want to accept real-time payments online it seems you have to have an Internet merchant account with your bank, pay the bank a monthly fee for internet transactions and pay an intermediate “payment gatway” (NetRegistry, eWay, CardAccess) company a monthly fee and transaction fees!

Conclusion

So I think the best compromise at the moment is PayPal’s Website Payments Standard. But then remember if you serve international customers, not everyone can pay with PayPal - so you’re going to need a manual process anyway.

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BizTalk 2006 Pre-Requisite CAB Files

December 11, 2005 at 9:00 am | In Technology | 12 Comments

Here are the links to all the different redistributable CAB files of the BizTalk 2006 Beta2 Pre-requisites (BtsRedist.cab).

They are ~52mb each and include:

  • Office Web Components (OWC) 11
  • Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) 2.8 SP1
  • Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 3.0 SP7
  • MSXML 6.0
  • SQLXML 3.0 SP3
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
  • Microsoft SQL Server ADOMD.NET 8.0
  • ADOMD.Net-KB893091-v8.00.0991-x86.EXE
  • ADOMD.NET 9.0

When installing BizTalk 2006, you can let the installer download the CAB file for you. But if you’re installing offline this can be problematic. So download the redistributables that you’re likely to use and add them to your toolkit.

Also, see the very latest BizTalk Server 2006 Beta 2 Installation guide

Redistributable CAB Files

Windows Server 2003

32–bit ENGLISH CN DE ES FR IT JA KO TW

64–bit ENGLISH CN DE ES FR IT JA KO TW 

Windows XP

32–bit ENGLISH CN DE ES FR IT JA KO TW

64–bit ENGLISH CN DE ES FR IT JA KO TW

Windows 2000 Server

32–bit ENGLISH CN DE ES FR IT JA KO TW

64–bit ENGLISH CN DE ES FR IT JA KO TW

Recommendation: Bug Tracking Software

December 11, 2005 at 6:28 am | In Resources, Technology | 6 Comments

Apparently I’m not the only one who has had difficulty finding a suitable bug tracking system for a software development project. Garret Dimon is not impressed with what’s out there.

Of course, if you have the cash to spare, go and get a copy of Joel’s FogBugz – I have never used it, but at $129USD per user and lots of respectable customers, it should be pretty polished.

Also, if you’re a .NET shop – start migrating to Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS). Bug tracking, work item tracking and source control are all integrated into Visual Studio. Just imagine checking-in some code and closing a bug at the same time – “this code check-in fixes this bug”. That’s traceability for you.

If your team is new to bug tracking, then I suggest you have a good read of Joel’s article – Painless Bug Tracking and make sure your system gets used properly.

At one of my recent projects, they did not have a bug tracking system and it would have been difficult to get them to spend money on a product because “we’ve come this far without it, why should we bother?” *sigh*.

My Recommendation: BugTracker.NET

BugTracker.NET is a free .NET 1.1 web app that uses SQL Server or MSDE as it’s database. What I like about it is that it’s simple to use and customisable to fit your environment.

Define your own statuses and workflow, or stick with the simple one it installs with.

If everybody using it is already on a windows domain, then you can use windows integrated authentication – which means one less username/password to administer and remember.

If you choose, you can set it up to use E-Mail. For instance, I get an email every time a bug is added/updated – this lets me keep a QA eye on everything that’s happening.

My Experience and Recommendations

It took me two weeks after setting it up to actually get the team of 10 using the system. Now, I believe they couldn’t live without it.

The way that I enticed them to use it was whenever they asked me to have a look at some code, or fix a bug I said “Is it in bug tracker? Create a bug in bug tracker and assign it to me, then I will look at it”. After that, the others started to do the same.

The bug statuses I have setup are:

  • New,
  • In Progress,
  • Checked-In,
  • Closed,
  • Resolved, and
  • Waiting for Customer.

The priorities I have setup are:

  • Low,
  • Medium,
  • High, and
  • Show-stopper.

A bug is not a bug unless…

It has these three things:

  • Steps to reproduce (repro) – e.g. I opened MyApp, Clicked X, Clicked Y, Typed ABC then pressed ENTER
  • Expected Result – e.g. The application should show “saved” message.
  • Actual Result – e.g. FormatException on line 22 of MainForm.cs

Summary

Whatever you do, Keep It Simple and make it EASY to submit bugs – the last thing you want is un-recorded bugs.

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Cow-tipping myth: Busted!

December 11, 2005 at 5:24 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

Scientists at a Canadian university have busted the myth of tipping over unsuspecting cows while intoxicated.

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