Tips: Installing sdk version of CommunityServer 2.1...

crosspost from http://rextang.net/blogs/work/

So I finally got some time to start the process of upgrading this blog site to CommunityServer 2.1. I downloaded the 2.1 SDK source, also requested a backup of currently running CS1.1 database from my web-hosting-provider, and started from here.

I had created a virtual machine as my development environment, with Windows 2003 R2 server and VisualStudio Team Suite  installed. as this website is currently running under ASP.NET 1.1, I am trying to start running it under ASP.NET 2.0. The goal is to preserve all my blog posts, photo images, and comments and do the technology upgrade and version-up reconstruction.

After unpack the SDK, and trying to open 2.0 solution file from VisualStudio, the first problem will be that VS2005 won't be able to open the web project since VS2005 now has a new non-project model for website solution. to solve this, I need to download the new Web Application Project (WAP) from ScottGu's website and install it. while the WAP installation it will require another VS2005 updates prior it. After the installation of WAP, CS2.1's ASP.NET 2.0 web project can be opened without problems.

For the IIS part, first editing the hosts file (on windows folder) to point my domain name to localhost, then create a virtual website to point to SDK's web folder, refering to the documentation to set proper read/write priviledges to folders.

For the database part, follow SDK's sqlscript folder's readme file to upgrade database schema from CS 1.1 to CS 2.1.

I did a full rebuild from the source code to regenerate all necessary binaries, and then trying to open my test site in browser. error happaned.

ERROR: Could not load file or assembly 'MemberRole, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b7c773fb104e7562' or one of its dependencies

Doing a search from google, found that I need to switch to asp.net 2.0 version's web.config file to avoid this error. the files is under "ASP.NET2_configs" folder of SDK source. I did the replace and trying to run again, another error occured.

Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection

Doing a search from google, found that it is something related to trusted connection to SQL server. since I am running CS database in different SqlServer 2005 machine other then web application machine, I decided to avoid this problem by not using trusted connection but using usual SqlServer authentication. just edit the web.config file and change the sqlserver connection string to set Trusted_Connection from yes to no.

By setting all those above, I can get a running instance of CS 2.1 site under my dev VM. the next is to modify the themes and skins of my blogs, also need to modify the source code to support non-keyword searching to be able to search Chinese and Japanese. also need to check about the new url rewrite model to see if it fits my requests (out-site url rewrite).

still need some time to finish my CS2.1 blog site, will post other tips if I found any.

Technorati Tags: communityserver , asp.net , programming