Last week I got started on getting the DotNetNuke Wiki module into a 4.4.0 source solution, so that I could convert the module to ASP.NET 2.0 and debug it in Visual Studio. Normally this wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary, I setup DotNetNuke solutions for a living, I can do it in my sleep, but I decided I was going to do all of this on my main machine running Windows Vista Ultimate edition.

You would think this might not be too difficult, but it sure was. Here's what I was starting with.

DotNetNuke 4.4.0 Source package, available for download from www.dotnetnuke.com.

Visual Studio 2005 w/ SP1

IIS7 Installed

IIS6 compatibility partially installed.

After multiple failures, and quite a bit of head smashing (on the wall) I gave up for the weekend.

I see this requested all the time, so I figured I'd blog how I proceed with upgrading a DNN Instance.

If you're upgrading your DotNetNuke instance, here is a list of simple steps to follow during the upgrade process.

First tip, test the upgrade on a staging site first, pull a copy of the database and files down, try the upgrade, make sure all your functionality is still there. Then upgrade production (backup everything first)

Just in time for Christmas a new version of DotNetNuke has been released. On it's 4 year anniversary of the first release, DotNetNuke released version 4.4.

"On December 24th, 2002, the code which was to become the DotNetNuke web application framework was first released to the community.  On the fourth anniversary of this date, DotNetNuke version 4.4.0 - a release with significant performance enhancements - has now been made available for download"

If you've never used DotNetNuke before, do yourself a favor and try it out, there are no licensing fees to download it, use it, or even modify it. It's open source, free, and a great way to easily start building a website via an intuitive web based UI.

Version 4.4 marks the first ASP.NET 2.0 only release, prior to this release DNN was maintaining two sets of code, one for .Net 1.1 and one for .Net 2.0. 4.4 marks significant improvements in performance over previous versions as ...

I'm normally the sales and marketing person here at Engage, but as a former .Net developer I still dable with C# (mostly as proof-and-concepts and / or prototype apps) and I still work on the occasional client project using DNN.  In using DNN 4.3.5 templates I ran across a weird bug I wanted to post to help anyone having the same problem.  (Don't worry, I'm also reporting this to DNN in Gemini). 

Here's the situation, I created a template of a site using 4.3.5.  This site the template was created for had several pages and I choose to export content and was using a host level skin (not sure if that mattered with this bug).  In one of the skin folders I had backed up the skin after making changes on the server to the stylesheet and had a zip folder in my skin folder.  When trying to create my new portal, I encountered the following error: