I got past the install issues I had by using the /nodemo flag but now I have another problem.

I cannot seem to figure out exactly how to add content to pages.  I have gone through the site setup wizard, added a manufacturer, 2 categories and a couple of products in each category.

What do I need to do to get the products to display on the home page?  I added a page named Products in the pages section of site admin but I don't understand how to add the page to the menu or add the product list to it.

Check this screen cast http://www.dotshoppingcart.com/Page/IntroductionV2.aspx.

I found that after I posted.  I finally figured out how to add a category list and product list.  It took some head scratching though...finally I figured out that you have to do a ctrl-f5 browser refresh after everything you change to see the effects.

Also, the "Enable Page Editor" button works sometimes and not other times, no matter whether I refresh or not.  All in all, the admin control panel is pretty clunky and difficult to use plus the entire site is extremely slow.  Will either of these issues be improved with the final release of the package?

Another thing I noticed is that I do not have all of the store blocks listed in the add block list shown in the screencast.  I have category list and product list but product preview is not there.

 >>  "Enable Page Editor" button works sometimes 
Make sure you wait until the page is fully loaded. The drop down menu is rendered by Javascript. Your server or client machine is probably slow. Are you using the shared hosting? You might want to post your hardware spec here. If you install the SQL server to your local server, you might want to limit the maximum memory it can take because if you don't set that SQL server is taking all the memory available in your server. We also offer hosted web store which guarantee quick response time. You could check our website or our featured stores.

  >>I have category list and product list but product preview is not there.
Yes, there are a lot of extra blocks offered only at commerial editions. They will be available in addon modules and DotShoppingCart Suite.

I have my own development, test  and production database and application servers.  Each environment has a separate physical machine for database and another for applications.  I am running DSC in my development environment with absolutely nothing else active at the time.  I even tested in in my test environment which mirrors my production environment of 3 clustered application servers and 3 clustered database servers.  Network connections between servers is gigabit so that is not an issue either.

Neither system speed, memory, network or SQL Server have anything to do with this. I have plenty of other applications using JS and none of them exhibit the sluggishness I see with DSC.  I can wait 5 minutes and the enable page editor button still works erratically.

I am looking for a shopping cart that I can integrate into existing ASP.Net applications that I've developed so I am not interested in a hosted solution.

I have been writing code for 35 years.  During that 35 years I have been a database administrator since relational databases came into existence and am certified as a DBA in DB2, Oracle, Informix, IDHS, Sybase and SQL Server.  I have worked with ASP.Net since its inception and can recognize inefficiently designed applications pretty well.  DSC definitely falls into the category of being inefficiently designed.

I haven't looked at any of the stored procedure query plans to see how efficient they are but I can do that if you would like.  I also haven't looked at the overall database design for inefficiencies either but would be happy to look at it too if you would like.

You have a great concept with DSC but it needs a lot of work to make it run efficiently.

Hm, you are the first one blaming the performance of DSC. It could be some settings in your environment didn't set it right. DSC uses extensive ASP.NET Caching based on SQL notification and Sprocs are definitely optimized. You might want to turn on ASP.NET trace or open up SQL profile to figure out what's going on.

One of the primary goals of DSC design is the performance and scalibility. Our main test machines are targeted at Dual Core 2.66G CPU with 2G memory. Install everything on to that machine and limit SQL memory to 1G. It can run just fine.

If you can spot any flaw, we will definitely fix it.