what is the difference between using Visual Studio with Source, or no source?

Hey all,

I'm new to NOP and I'm trying to figure out the pros and cons of deploying this with or without the source? Is there any general information on how and why you would do it one way over the other?

Once it's done is it easy to see how it was done and make changes?

Please see this: http://www.strivingprogrammers.com/Blog/post/Lavish-Kumar/25/Difference-between-No-Source-Web-OR-Source-Code-of-nopCommerce/

The link above is dead. I was also wondering the same thing. When I do a file by file comparison, the difference is that 6 dlls do not publish from Visual Studio.

Please see this: http://www.strivingprogrammers.com/top-5-questions-answered-about-developing-nopcommerce-based-store-site

Thank you. There was also a broken link from the FAQ page in the documentation. Not sure if you are redirecting or just updated the post... Excellent article. I am actually testing nopcommerce locally with about 10k products with variations as a start and will install themes and plugins and most probably, edit the source code as well since I want to integrate with custom tables and data sources. The website I am migrating has about 150k products and was built on classic ASP. Still works great but it is time to catch up with newer commerce features.

With that said, I can imagine upgrading to a newer version is a painful task, especially if it is a major upgrade or one has to do upgrades in increments!