What's the _usual_ development practice for sites with integrations to ERP systems?

I'm a .NET developer looking to develop an e-Commerce site with nop for a customer. They have a bespoke ERP system that the site needs sync with (daily).

I know nop comes in binary and source code flavours; I'm just wondering what the usual development process is. Is the binary version mostly aimed at people looking to do it themselves, deploy to hosting, install a theme and a payment provider and away you go, while the source version is aimed at developers who are looking to build a bespoke platform. Or do developers err towards the binary distribution unless they absolutely have to be able to change the source?

Thanks,
Greg

Yes sort of like that. In the “non-source” version yes there are binary files (.dll's) but as you may know there are also the .cshtml view files and various other files included in the package.
The end result on the webserver host is the same.
You create the non-source version from the source version. That is, the output of building the source version with Visual Studio is to create the non-source version. Everyone uses a non-source version on the webserver - just different versions so to speak.

So as you have said, if you have no intention of making changes to the source code (binary files) then you don’t need the source code version. That’s not to say you cannot change the non-source version with changes to the .cshtml, adding plugins, changing themes and configuration settings.

For developers the preferred way is not to change the core of the source version but in fact to make plugins that change, overwrite or override the functionality of the core code. In that way the system is easier to build upon, upgrade and maintain because when a new version comes along it is just a matter of updating your plugin to work with the new version.

Although even if you are not going to change the core code you still need the source code version to develop plugins as they reference the core code in the VS Build process.

Thanks for your response @Yidna.

@Yidna, you say "the preferred way is not to change the core of the source version" with the exception of the razor views. Is it also common to change the model classes too? One of the first tutorials in the docs is about updating an existing entity.

In that article, it mentions having to manually update the database, Googling I can see a few articles about using EF Migrations with nop but they sem to relate to custom DbContexts used in plugins, not necessarily the core DbContext. What is the usual way to apply database changes like this?