Yesterday, version four of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK was released (as noted in this blog post, V4 VS SDK Targeting VS 2005 Released!).  While I don't plan on developing any Visual Studio add-ins or extensions, I noticed that the SDK included SandCastle, which is a tool to build documentation based on your inline XML comments.  If you're working with large or distant groups, it can help to compile some of your work into a readable API document, and SandCastle will do that for you.  You'll need to go to http://www.sandcastledocs.com/ to get an automation script or GUI, since this release doesn't include any interface.  Get it here:

The Rating control from the AjaxControlToolkit has been of use to use as we work on some of our websites that use our Engage: Publish module.  However, we needed to make a change to the style of the container around the Rating in order to change a background image from saying "Please rate!" to "Thanks for rating."  We tried wrapping it in an UpdatePanel to get at the CssClass, but we couldn't get it to react.  Eventually, we got the following javascript to work (which needs to be declared after divRating is declared).

<div id="divRating" class="divRatingBefore">
   <ajaxToolkit:Rating ID="ajaxRating".../>
</div> ...

Since the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, we've been making use of the new functionality offered us through AJAX, both from the core extensions and through the AjaxControlToolkit.  However, we've run into a road block a number of times when we're tried to use the new UpdatePanel control to add some AJAX responsiveness into our web pages.  In short, we hadn't ever gotten it to work.

Recently, some clients were pressing us for some functionality that required UpdatePanels (or diving much deeper than we liked into JavaScript), so after another failed attempt at partial rendering, I handed the project over to a colleague to see if he might have any better luck.  Fortunately, he was able to search out the information we needed.  I had seen Jon Henning's

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)