February 2005 - Posts
First off, I wanted to thank Jayson
Knight for his help with this project. Without the source for his DotTextCS
project, this would not have been possible. Also thanks to Divelements, whose WizardControl WinForms
component made it easier for me to build this app.
I'm pleased to announce that I've completed work on a wizard to automate the
process of moving from .Text to CommunityServer. It has been tested on
several different size installations, including a test run for LonghornBlogs.com, which will be live
shortly.
Features:
- Installs all script files and schemas for the CommunityServer destination
database
- Automatically creates new authors with the proper permissions
- Automatically creates new blogs & blog directories for those
authors
- Automatically migrates entry statistics
- Automatically migrates blog settings (news, secondarycss, etc)
- Automatically creates custom blog groups based on your .Text
settings.
- Allows you to select which blogs to migrate
- Allows you to save the DTS packages to the server for troubleshooting
- Quick Install option assumes you're starting with a blank database and
migrating all blogs, reducing the number of steps to beginning the
process
- Multithreaded to give you realtime feedback on the status of the
migration
- Heavy logging for help troubleshooting failed migrations.
As I've said, I've tested it on several sites, and it works well in all cases
on my end. If you have any problems, please reply to this thread and I'll fix it
as soon as I can.
Some things to remember:
- Right now, the source and destination databases need to be on the same
server. If enough people need to move between separate servers, I can add it
later.
- You need to run the wizard on a machine where the CS web application is
installed. This is because the temporary web service we use to create users
and blogs needs to run in the HttpContext of the application (more on my
feelings about this later).
- You will need to set up CS and change the web.config file to point to the
destination database you will use to complete the migration. Again, this is
because the web service will use those settings to create blogs, users, and
blog groups.
- Depending on the number of users, blogs, posts, referrers, etc, this
process can take SEVERAL HOURS. DTS is rather fast, but it
still took over seven hours to migrate LonghornBlogs.com
- You may need to use the CS admin UI to change the blog theme after the
migration. I'm looking into why this isn't working, but it's not a
showstopper, so I'm releasing it anyway.
That being said, enjoy! Don't forget to back up your .Text database first. It
doesn't have as much UI validation as I would like, so you can expect some minor
improvements.
Download
Now!
Rob,
Scott, and
team have FINALLY
released
CommunityServer 1.0. Great job, guys! As
Jayson Knight mentioned, I'm wrapping up
a .Text -> CS conversion wizard. Should be finished soon, I'm having to deal
with some limitations of the CS APIs.
<NoteToSelf> Next time, remember the cord to the external drive that
has the VPC image of the demos.</NoteToSelf>
I would have been really screwed if I hadn't brought my girlfriend to be my
assistant. The talk got off to a really rocky start, but I think it went well
overall. It was my first big talk like that, so I was a bit nervous. Hopefully,
the reviews are good enough that they'll invite me back.
At any rate, thanks to everyone who came, and here is a link to the handout I
talked about: Deprecated
Server Control Designer Classes in VS2005. I'll post the code for the demos
tomorrow.
A new vulnerability was announced for all Mozilla-based browsers. Apparently
they are vulnerable to phishing attacks just like everyone else. Looks like the
rose-colored glasses are coming off. Source: Neowin
Just got into town. I'm staying at the Hotel Palomar with the rest of the speakers, and it should be a grand old time. I don't have pictures yet, but will post soon. If you wanna get a hold of me, my cell is 480-580-2726. I won't have it for a couple hours while it's charging, but leave me a message and we'll hook up.
Looking forward to an exciting week.
According to
News.com, 13 patches for Microsoft products are being released on February 8th. One fixes a "critical" flaw in Visual Studio and Office, and one is for an "important" vulnerability in the .NET Framework. I don't have any details on what these flaws are, but I guess we'll have to find out on Tuesday.
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