Sitefinity upgrade with hotfixes? - sitefinity

Just getting ready to upgrade from 5.1 to 6.3. We have never performed an upgrade before.
About the upgrade path: When installing the updates, do I need to install the hotfixes, or just the major releases? (My gut says only major releases).
I found the documentation here:
http://www.sitefinity.com/documentation/documentationarticles/upgrading-you-sitefinity-5.1-project-to-the-latest-version
Is this documentation enough to make a smooth upgrade?

Yeah, just follow the documentation in the link you posted.
My process is to take full backups of the site files and database then perform the upgrade locally. Do the first step in the upgrade path then run through the site to test, back end and front end, then run the next step in the upgrade, and so on. I suppose if you want to be extra careful you could take additional backups between each upgrade step but that's probably overkill.
When making the web.config changes, there is an option to have Project Manager merge them for you but I end up just using Beyond Compare to compare the _EmptyProject folder in the extracted Project Manger files to my local files and do the web.config changes through a file compare. It cuts down on the differences in files from upgrade to upgrade and shows you whats been changed. The _EmptyProject folder is essentially the vanilla Sitefinty site files for that version.
Once the site is fully upgraded locally, I just publish the site in Visual Studio, copy the files over to the live site and overwrite the live database with a backup of my locally upgraded database.
Hope that helps.

I have upgraded Sitefinity 5.1 to 6.0, on a website which is in production (which included going through a couple of steps for the versions between).
I just followed the guidelines, and it went fine.
Now there are a couple of things you need to be aware of :
Source control
If your Sitefinity solution is on "Source Control", you should create a new duplicate of your solution, and disconnect this one(newly created) from "Source Control" before starting the upgrade. And of course you do the upgrade on the solution which is not in Source Control. Because you will probably have a lot of dll's to integrate, and if you have the project manager, your sitefinity project will run correctly, even though the new dll's aren't properly integrated in your solution and possibly "source control".
Unexpected behaviours of previously working elements
Secondly, I didn't test the frontend and backend during the different steps (Sitefinity versions within upgrade), but I tested everything once my solution had reached the last Sitefinity version. I thought I had checked everything, but it wasn't the case, and some of my custom Widgets didn't work properly on the latest version of Sitefinity. Next time I'll go more in detail on all custom parts, since from a working version of Sitefinity, you can end up with a newer version that breaks some behaviours. If you notice this, you might better wait a bit more for a fix, or the next release which might fix the problems.
Outside access to website during upgrade.
Furthermore, once you need to do the upgrade on the production database/website, the website shouldn't be accessed by people, since the upgrade of database might take some time.
Time needed for upgrading everything
One more thing I would like to add, it takes time to perform upgrade of several versions.
The first time I upgraded (I needed to go through 2 versions), and having to upgrade locally, to a development database, deploy the website on developement environment, then make it again on test. I took about 4 hours before everything was fully working. Make sure you have enough time, because it can be more tricky if you need to stop everything then come back to it.

Related

How to upgrade Aurelia project from version v0.24.0 to current version v1.2.3

I'm trying to upgrade a very old version of Aurelia CLI project v0.24.0 to the current version v1.2.3. I've tried to follow the steps from this link from the docs but when I try to run it I receive this error:
So my question is what is the best approach to upgrade it from such an old version to the newest one?
Just a screenshot of error is too little info to give proper advice on. And between the currently latest version of v1.2.3 and v0.24.0 (Jan, 2017) there's roughly 3 years. Fun part is, you'd be amazed at relatively how little Aurelia core itself has changed. Simply because a lot remained stable.
Most impactful changes will be in either:
aurelia_project folder, with the build and config routines
bundler config (system.js, webpack, requirejs - whichever you've used)
That being said, this does not necessarily mean that your dependencies have also remained stable in those past three years. Especially in Javascript world. To accommodate for this, I would suggest:
Create a blank, new project with the latest Aurelia CLI
Copy/paste over the /src folder from your old project to your new one
Take in consideration specifics, like package.json from your old project and migrate them by hand (reinstalling) in your new project
Again, try to keep your bundler similar and you will have relatively little changes. But if you choose you want to migrate from System.Js to Webpack, it'll be a bit more hassle. But arguably, rewarding in the end if your project needs to be kept alive for a longer while.
Considering the age of your old project, restarting with a clean setup and config is what I would consider to be "the best way" to retouch only the necessities.

Your developer license has expired (Windows 8)

My temporary developer license (using Visual Studio 2011 Beta and Windows 8 Consumer Preview) expired and a popup asked me to aply for a new one. This all seemed to work, but when I build and deploy to the local machine it takes me to the app store and tells me that the developer license has expired.
I've tried:
Unistalling my app from the home screen
Cleaning my project solution
Removing my developer license using powershell command Unregister-WindowsDeveloperLicense and getting new license again
Restarting machine
I can create new projects that build and deploy fine, but my existing project is stuffed. Is the old licence cached somewhere and how can I get it to forget about it.
There is this similar quesion on MSDN. Someone managed to solve it, but there solution has not worked for me and there are other people saying it hasn't worked for them.
The first month this happened to me, a reboot solved it. The second time it didn't. I went into my package manifest and changed the package ID. It looked like a GUID and I just put kmg on the end. Then everything worked fine. Later I tried changing it back but it failed again so I guess my package ID ends in kmg now :-)
I believe it's because you're trying to overwrite a package that was shipped by a "different developer". They're going to have to fix that somehow but hey, this is what betas ^H^H^H^H^H previews are for, right?

Xwiki - Error with Apostrophe in Space Title or Page Title

I have installed a fresh install of XWiki on a Windows platform.
The XWiki instance was installed using hsql for data storage.
The XWiki instance is hosted on Apache Tomcat.
Some of my users entered an apostrophe into the title of a page as well as the page content.
I received the following error:
http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XE-767
What is my next step to fix my broken XWiki instance?
Is there a way to upgrade a XWiki instance to a version that works? How do I save my existing content?
From reviewing the developers comments, it appears that issue has been corrected.
I, however, do not have enough background in Java or XWiki to know how I can move forward.
Thank you in advance for your help.
Indeed, the best solution is to upgrade to a newer version. Don't worry, upgrades are not that difficult.
http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/AdminGuide/Installation#HUpgradinganXWikiInstallation
There are two parts in an upgrade: the platform, meaning all the files on the filesystem, and the wiki content, since quite often things change in the default wiki documents. Your specific bug can be fixed by upgrading the platform part, so if you're not too confident about upgrading the wiki content, you can just leave the old content in place.
In order not to lose your current database, be sure to leave the old "database" folder in place, and just replace the "webapps\xwiki" part.
From the error report the versions that fix the issue are
2.7 - http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/ReleaseNotesXWikiEnterprise27
2.6.1 - http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/ReleaseNotesXWikiEnterprise261
You can upgrade to one of them or to any following version, like XE
3.0 - http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ReleaseNotes/ReleaseNotesXWikiEnterprise30
All versions can be downloaded from http://forge.ow2.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=170
In a project that has such a rapid development cycle is very good to upgrade often in order to benefit from the latest features and bug fixes.

How to migrate WebSphere app with no WAR/EAR file

I am to migrate a Websphere machine (including the applications which run on it) to a new machine. They wanted a clean install of the OS and WebSphere, so I did that. I also took a full file backup of all of the applications they had on the old server. The problem is that to re-install them on the new server, the WebSphere dialog asks me for the JAR/EAR/WAR file, which I don't have.
Is there any reasonably easy way to simply extract the backup of the WebSphere application files I have taken from the old maching, and simply configure the new machine to use them? WAR, etc. is a nice feature to have, but to be forced to use it seems silly.
Edit: The existing WebSphere server is still up and running in production.
Edit: The old server is WAS 3.5, which means it doesn't even have an export function, sadly. Also, the directory where it actually runs the content from has a completely different structure (consisting of like a a %/Web and %/Servlet, where % is the context path of the application). In the "Install" section, it doesn't even mention EAR or WAR, only JAR. I am currently thinking that perhaps the best thing to do might be to just copy the directory over to another WAS 3.5 system and then upgrade that system (and hope it converts the folder structure and updated the config as part of the upgrade).
Edit: The closest thing I have found to a solution so far is this link:
http://www.javazoom.net/services/newsletter/was4.html (though I am not sure if that tool is available or relevant for WAS 7.x).
This has to be a problem other people have run into before, but I can't find a solution anywhere on the WEB.
Thank you!
Here do they have sample Jacl scripts one can use to export/import appserver's configuration. So that is what you can start with. If your new bow uses the same version of WAS (and the same topology if it is not a standalone box) as the old one, it might be a (relatively) safe process.
Migration between different versions of Websphere might be somewhat more tricky, but I'm sure IBM published at least one redbook on that topic.
If you still have the old server running, than just export the apps and you have the war/ear files. However, If you don't know the configuration for the apps, you are screwed. However, I am sure IBM has tools that you can use. Some of the paid tools look even nice and user friendly (at least according to their sales demos). I can't tell you what you need, since I don't know what documentation you have for your apps. But as it looks like there is not much there, otherwise you would just install the application the same way they were installed on your old server and use the binaries (war, ear, jar) that are archived somewhere.

How do I set up a build server on the cheap/free?

Currently I'm tasked with doing the daily build. We have an ASP.NET 2005 website with a SQL Server 2005 backend. Our current source control is Visual Source Safe 2005.
At this point, I use the brute-force method of daily builds.
Get Latest version of source code
Get Latest version of Database release script
Backup old website files to a directory
Publish new code to my local machine
Run on my server to keep the test/stage site working
Push newly created files to the website
Run SQL Script on test database (assuming updates, otherwise I don't bother)
Test website on the Test Server.
Looking at the idea of automated builds intrigues me since it means that I do less each morning. How would you recommend I proceed? I want to have a fully fleshed out idea before I present it to my boss.
Ditch VSS, move to Subversion, and check out CruiseControl.NET. Alternatively, if you have a MSDN developer license, you can run TFS workgroup edition and set up a build server on any old XP box. Its what we do at our shop.
As Assaf noted, you can use CC.NET with VSS directly. Nice.
TeamCity has worked well for me. It has a very simple setup. Combine it with an MsBuild script for your operations and you're auto-matic.
For build management I wholeheartedly recommend TeamCity. It doesn't require IIS6 (like CC.net does) since it runs on it's own copy of Tomcat and the setup is all done thru various forms. This is a big deal to me since the build server is just an XPPro box. It integrates well with SVN and there is no crazy XML file manipulation like I had to do with CruiseControl.Net. Big win for me.
For a build runner we use NAnt to send emails to various people, copy the packaged builds where they're supposed to go, run NUnit and NCover, and deploy the software to our web farm.
For automated testing we use Watin.
http://www.nunit.org/index.php
http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity
http://ncover.sourceforge.net/
http://subversion.tigris.org/
http://nant.sourceforge.net/
http://watin.sourceforge.net/
Try CruiseControl.Net. It's free, and whatever customized daily/continuous routine you want it to perform you can always add with scripts.
Remember, it's not just about daily (nightly) builds, but also about letting you catch build errors in time (since it continuously builds after every source commit/check-in). You don't necessarily test every code chance on every possible platform and build configuration, but CC can do exactly that for you (in the background).
http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Visual+Source+Safe+Source+Control+Block
All of what you are doing can be performed by a set of batch files, depending on how automated your test environment is. The main batch file can be started as a 'scheduled task' at midnight or whatever. That's how we 'do it cheap' here and at other places I've worked. If you need help with a particular batch, I can provide a sample.
I second (or third) the reccomendation for Subversion/CruiseControl.net. Also, if it is appropriate, check out hosted services for SVN like CVSDude. You'll probably become well versed with MSBuild in the process too. Once you get it setup it is great.
The cost doesn't come from licensing of the tools or even hardware necessarily, but from your time building and maintaining the system - and depending on what you are doing, that could become significant.
Start with the basics and incrementally improve it over time. Like anything else, if you try to come out of the gate with lots of automation and functionality you could find yourself mired in it fulltime for weeks.
Whatever tools you use, house them in a virtual machine (ie., vmware).
When the equipment inevitably goes south, you can copy the image onto any machine and not miss a beat because your build server decided to take the day off, assuming of course, you back up.