Ecoomerce starter kit bugs

i just started evaluating sitefinity 5.1 about 2 days ago and i also installed the 5.1 sdk.But the problem i having is with the eCommerce site.After successfully publishing the site,at the home page of the eCommerce site ,when i click a button on an item in the home page it redirects me to a blank site with error message 404 "page not found" .also the drop down header for checking out after adding items to cart doesn't respond.Please are there any modifications that need to be done to solve this bug because its my first time loading the sample app(didn't modify anything) and its throwing missing page when i click some items.

please any help will be appreciated.

Hi Thomas,

I have answered your ticket on the same subject. I'll paste the answer here for your convenience:

"Hello Thomas,

Thank you for contacting us.

Can you elaborate on "After successfully publishing the site"? Do you mean that you have used thepublish function in Visual Studio? If that is the case I would suggest to avoid the publish functionality of Visual Studio as other clients have encountered problems when using it for publishing their websites. I assume that due to the fact that VS builds and publishes the project and its files, it kills all processes that use the files and sometimes does not even copy the files. The easiest ( and safest ) way to deploy your project files to the server is to copy them to the destination folder on the server using FTP client. 

I hope this helps and please let me know if you have any further questions." 

@Pavel,

No offense but I continuously use Visual Studio's 'publish' feature to build & deploy to development/test/production environment and it works flawlessly. 

Comments like these "it kills all processes that use the files and sometimes does not even copy the files" shouldn't be made here (devnet forum) and certainly shouldn't be posted in a support ticket.

Whether I FTP over all the files or use VS publish or use copy/paste - it will all kill processes.

If the file isn't copied over, than its configured to not be copied.
You know how extremely useful that feature is when publishing to several environments (dev/test) and you don't continuously want to be afraid of overwriting DataConfig.Config ?

All it takes is setting up proper 'include in project' and 'content, do not copy' one time instead of having to manually think about which files to FTP over and which not. Because essentially that's what Visual Studio publish does - it builds and deploys(FTP, webdav or local copy). 

Hello Jochem,

Thank you for your constructive feedback and input on this thread.

I completely agree with you that if properly configured, Visual Studio "Publish" is a very powerful tool that can speed up your development. However, the only reason, as you have properly pointed out (ad I believe Pavel's idea was the same, although expressed in a little different manner) is that the feature might be tricky to configure initially, and sometimes lead to problems that lurk there for a while, finally showing up when the client has even forgotten the fact some files might have not been included when publishing.

Most of the times we've had clients report problems with Visual Studio Publish it has been due to a configuration file or some other asset locked by source control, or not included in the solution to be published. Of course this does not mean that FTP-ing the files as we recommend is the best option, it's just more fool-proof in the sense that you are deploying an exact copy of what you have running locally, so people don't need to focus on the files to be uploaded, but on setting up the configurations for the hosting environment.

I would be really grateful if you could elaborate on "However, setting up the project properly takes some initial time which could easily be avoided if the project would have been setup correctly out-of-the-box.", and hear any specific suggestions you might have in this direction. As you know your feedback is highly valued and we have always taken it into account, so any input on this topic would be highly appreciated.

On a side note, since the thread concerned Thomas' problem with our Corporate Starter Kit, I would agree with Jochem (again :) ) that runnig the project with the integrated SDK webserver, or VS integrated webserver is the most comfortable way to go. If any issues persist there, then indeed there might be a problem with the sample project, however we haven't managed to reproduce it locally, neither in testign stages of the SDK nor when you reported the behavior, so any input on the exact steps taken to reproduce it would help us give you a more focused advice.

Looking forwards to your reply.

All the best,
Boyan Barnev
the Telerik team

Just my 2 cents. I have been using the Publish button as well. The only issues I was encountering was that it was not copying the RESX files. So my labels that I have renamed would go to the defaults again. Some other files as well. I must admit that I have included them into the project but still would not do it. Anyway, I have been using the Publish button and some common sense and it has been OK for me. But big J, if you have any suggestions that you can put down in an ordered list, I would love to read them.
Many thanks,
Andrei

@Boyan,

I totally realize the feedback wasn't constructive, you don't have to be polite :) 
The 'white lie' about "just use FTP" for novice users I can understand, sometimes its easier than going 3 or 4 rounds in explaining all the little details and using up support resources.

But Sitefinity supports is the industry standard, and since novice users sometimes tend to take matters rather black and white, outright blaming VS 'publish' is a tad to much corner cutting. Two weeks or two months from now when someone else suggest using 'Publish' you got to talk that user/client down first on their beliefs that its bad... and besides nobody wants to see this thread in Google search results next to Scott Hanselman's You're Doing It Wrong blog post ;)

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@Andrei
Come on - I'm 1.92m tall but that's not big nor do I like horses so... ;)  The trick is the 'Build Action' under properties, where 'content' gets published and 'none' gets left behind. 

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I'll write up a list on how I usually go from project file out of the box to fully publishable later but let me illustrate one simple example why I'm such a big fan of the 'publish' functionality:

These days we all use minified css and javascript files on our production servers, some of use use other techniques as LESS/SASS/Coffeescript as well. In the screen-shot you'll see a snippet of the theme/global directory where there's a .less file, a .css file and a .min.css file.

@Boyan,