My Experience Upgrading to .Text 0.95
Well, it has been an interesting evening indeed. I just spend the past 4 hours picking apart .Text 0.95, and upgrading LonghornBlogs.com. I figured I might as well start with the hardest upgrade, since it uses all custom skins. I've been waiting for this upgrade for a very long time, so after upgrading Interscape's Support Site yet again, I decided to make plenty of backups, and dig in.
I have to say, that ScottW's idea for an installation Wiki was a killer one. I've made several edits to the process. I was sad to find the SkinChanges page barren, but I remedied that over the course of the evening. If I find any additional snafus, I will be sure to log them. One thing you should note, the new version uses a quasi-implementation of MasterPages. The “MasterPage“ is called DTP.aspx. It now holds a decent part of the functionality that used to be in “PageTemplate.ascx“. Make sure that any custom skins put any body-tag styles in DTP.aspx, not in the skin's PageTemplate.
ScottW posted a new build tonight. Find out more about it here. There is a bug in the Opml.aspx page. Basically, you need to comment out the “writer.WriteStartDocument“ line on the page and recompile. This would be that stupid XmlTextWriter bug that I keep talking about and Microsoft keeps telling me is not a bug (MS: hint, it's a usability bug not a functionality bug). The page is adding an header with a default encoding of UTF-16, which in many cases, IE does not parse properly. This is one of those cases. ScottW will fix it in the next release, but for now, just comment it out.
I also fixed that REALLY ANNOYING bug in FreeTextBox that screws up posts that contain <'s and >'s when you edit them. Several people thought I was dumb and said “Why don't you just use '<' and '>' ?” Well, those people have never used FreeTextBox or .Text before. Anyways, I described the fix in an earlier post, and took a few minutes to implement it. After a few quick tests, I determined that it works. Thankfully, it is not strong-named, so no recompile is necessary. I re-versioned the assembly “1.6.5000.4” to denote that it is compiled with .NET 1.1, and zipped it up for you to download. You can find it here, just unzip it and drop the assembly in your .Text bin folder. I'd add the code to the CVS system on SourceForge, but I don't have a clue how it works, and I don't have the time to care. Hopefully, someone will put it into the next public drop.
I'll be updating the rest of my blog communities tomorrow night. Hope this is helpful. Let me know if anyone finds any bugs in the LonghornBlogs.com upgrade.