It was important for me to upgrade DBVT.COM/BLOG from BlogEngine.NET 1.4 to 1.45 as soon as possible so I could focus on other Open Source Online Community application pursuits in the queue. This weekend presented a window of opportunity to upgrade and I took it.
I upgraded my blog once a month since moving to BlogEngine.NET in June. In contrast, DBVT.COM Community Server upgrades occurred once a year. Things are obviously more fluid for me now, which is an aspect of successful Open Source applications like BlogEngine.NET that I honestly was not anticipating. Based on my experience over the last two months I say, "bring it on!" While I don't thrill to the idea of updating my blog, being part of an active community like BlogEngine.NET is worth it.
I spent between 6-to-8 hours upgrading from 1.4 to 1.45. That included WinMerge pre-upgrade analysis, the upgrade on my office development server, then updating and testing DBVT.COM. You have to remember that DBVT.COM is heavily customized, so I'm essentially recreating a themed site with each upgrade. Maybe Mads, Al and crew will have a BE.NET 1.5 release ready in another month. If so, a 9/10/08 BE.NET 1.5 release would keep the upgrade frequency sufficient for me to refine the process and reduce the upgrade time even further.
A lot of work in the BlogEngine.NET 1.45 Release was done with user account management, yet I was able to reconfigure my web.config to support shared ASPNET Membership setup without skipping a beat. There may be work to do in the future as functional enhancements are added in BE.NET based on the brand new be_Users and be_Roles tables, but we'll deal with those if they arise.
One "glitch" I encountered during the upgrade was a sporadic "Root Element was Missing" error, which I discovered was related to the fact that none of my BlogEngine.NET Extensions were loading. Thanks to the active BE.NET discussions on CodePlex.com I was able to quickly find a solution, which was to update ExtensionType = "1" in the be_DataStoreSettings table for all existing extensions. Funny how such a simple SQL query can bring so much joy to an upgrade.
So that's it. I'm now running BlogEngine.NET 1.45. The mark of a successful upgrade is that it is uneventful. Unless I hear from you otherwise, I'll assume, as Tom Cruise said in Top Gun on his chances of getting lucky with Kelly McGillis in the women's bathroom, "It's looking good so far."