Manual Deployment of SharePoint Commerce Services
I've been struggling a bit lately with the Manual Deployment of SharePoint Commerce services. While I posted to the CS2009 newsgroups, I received no help; eventually I figured it out myself. The crux of the problem lies in the Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 Installation and Configuration Guide which IMHO could use come clarification in a couple of different places. The first problem is with step 9 on page 88 which suggests that you can access your newly created SharePoint Web app without having created a site collection. While I'm no SharePoint expert (yet), my local SharePoint cohorts suggest that without creating a site collection on the site, you cannot access http://localhost:port/Pages/default.aspx/ without observing a 404 error which is exactly what I observed. In the Microsoft Commerce Server 2009 Installation and Configuration Guide the step of creating a site collection comes much later so I think that this is just out of order issue. In any case, I went ahead and created a site collection after creating the web site and app and them am able to access http://localhost:port/Pages/default.aspx such that I can continue on with step 10 to set anonymous access to the entire web site.
The next problem comes in step 5 on page 91. Step 5 suggests that you "activate all features whose names begin with Commerce Server in the Web application where you deployed the Web Parts". Step 5 pertains to when when you are deploying the Web Parts only and if you attempt to activate features that are specific to the Default Site it only results in errors and head scratching. Activating "Default Site" features is wrong and will cause errors. Only activate those feature which do not have "Default Site"in their name. Perhaps the the best way to see what should and should not be activated is to perform a wizard deployment of web parts only and see what features are activated.