I'd really like to thank everyone for your kind words, notes of concern and continued readership. My health issues have still not been diagnosed (constant lower back pain, uncontrolled muscle spasms in the lower back and legs and sometimes severe muscle cramps) but my daily regimen of medication, physical therapy, exercise and prayer seem to be working and my condition has stabilized to the point where I feel I can blog once again.
My first order of business will be to answer the backlog of questions and comments that I've received over the past several months and to let you know about some of the exciting new projects I'm working on.
iPhone E-Commerce Using Commerce Server 2007, ASP.NET 3.5 & Apple's iPhone SDK!
Yes, you've read it correctly and I'd like to begin by apologizing to the Windows Mobile folks but Apple offers a much (MUCH) better user experience in Safari on iPhone than Microsoft does on Internet Explorer Mobile. Safari on iPhone is a much faster and more standards compliant browser than the current version of IE Mobile and those two factors alone make the iPhone / iPod Touch a much more compelling platform to target for a mobile e-commerce web application.
Having said that, I still feel that Commerce Server 2007 running on IIS 6 or 7 using ASP.NET 3.5 (web forms & ASP.NET AJAX or the new ASP.NET MVC) offers a much more robust development platform one which to create a data driven web app than any of the other platforms out there!
Combine Commerce Server's profiles, catalog and basket systems with the clean, standards compliant XHTML markup possible in ASP.NET 3.5, along with the CSS2.1 / CSS3 UE goodness found only in the iPhone SDK's new version of Safari on iPhone and Dashcode and you've got a potential winner!
Putting this all together should prove to be one of the most exciting projects I've ever worked on and a whole lot of fun!