upgrade completed

Okay, so the change I made on Friday was completed easily enough, and very quickly.  This newer version was having problems with the older database on my dev server, so I decided to do a complete backup and then erase everything before upgrading. I thought it would actually take several hours, bit it was all done in about 40 minutes I think.

There were two causes of concern for me.  The first was that I needed to erase the tables in the database and start again.  There is an upgrade path, but it wasn’t working properly for me.  User Profiles and Extensions weren’t being handled properly and the relevant pages were causing errors.  The last time I handled this large a series of SQL transactions it took several hours as the database was in California.  This time however, the server is in London, so was much faster for me.  I probably spent no more than 15 minutes getting the SQL server stuff done.  Steps were as follows :  I had to backup the entire database and copy it to my development SQL Server here.  Then I had to drop the tables and recreate them using the “New Installation” script that comes with BlogEngine.Net.

While the above was going on, I had erased all the files from the server and started to upload the files from the new installation.  I had to be careful not to erase the photo gallery, so I moved that elsewhere while the upgrade was going on.  I had to edit only two files – the web.config and the sitemap.  Web.Config needed only two small changes – one to handle the database settings, and one to ensire strict XHTML conformance (which is slightly broken even now, will get that fixed soon). By the time the files were uploaded, I had taken the backed up SQL data and installed it as a new database on my development server.  That allowed me an easier migration path for the old data, as I could use the SQL Server Import Wizard to handle it all for me.  Once I had the tables done, I changed the settings to match what I had used before, and then tested everything. 

I have to say, this version of BlogEngine.Net is far better than the previous release.  Many of the bugs that were plaguing my installation have been fixed, and there is a noticeable speed increase too.  From my perspective (considering I use Windows Live Writer to write and edit blog posts), there only remains one bug, and that’s fairly minor.  So, hopefully this should all work better and easier for you.  Oh, if anyone is using the RSS feed to read my blog, could they let me know?  I’m going to be playing with that a little soon and I need to know how many of you ready it on a regular basis.  Feedburner says there were sixteen active subscribers… is that really the case? Let me know!