I just upgraded to BlogEngine.NET 2.5 and found the process to be fairly straight forward. The upgrade instructions suggest that you start from a v2.5 installation, and then copy your existing data and settings into the fresh install. I did this and then copied some additional files that were not explicitly mentioned in the instructions. Most of these were files that I added myself to customise the blog.
- The
apple-touch-icon.pngfile into the root folder. - Extensions I added into the
App_Code/Extensionsfolder. - The assembly for a custom extension I wrote into the
binfolder. - SQL Server CE runtime files and .NET provider assembly into the
binfolder. - JavaScript files for the jQuery lightBox plugin that I use.
After the upgrade I did get one compiler error in the SimpleDownloadCounter extension.
Compiler Error Message: CS1061: ‘BlogEngine.Core.BlogSettings’ does not contain a definition for ‘StorageLocation’ and no extension method ‘StorageLocation’ accepting a first argument of type ‘BlogEngine.Core.BlogSettings’ could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
That was easily fixed by replacing the occurrence of BlogSettings.Instance.StorageLocation with BlogConfig.StorageLocation.
I moved from VistaDB to SQL Server CE during the 2.0 upgrade so that more difficult migration was already done. This time I only needed to run the SQL_CE_UpgradeFrom2.0to2.5.sql upgrade script to update my SQL Server CE database schema. I used the SQL Server Compact Toolbox add-in for Visual Studio 2010 to run the script and had no problems.
Because I run a custom theme I check for new additions to the Standard theme and add any that I feel are required into my own. A quick check of the differences showed a new item was added to the header menu in the site.master file. It adds a link to the menu that allows a user to
switch between the regular and mobile version of the site when viewed on a mobile device.
<% if (Utils.IsMobile) { %>
<li><blog:MobileThemeSwitch runat="server" /></li>
<% } %>
It seemed like a cool feature so I added the new code to my custom theme and tested the site from my iPhone to check that the new menu item was working. There were also a couple of CSS modifications that I moved over too. The last thing was to fix the titles on the Recent Comments and Recent Posts widgets. Either the space in the titles was removed during the upgrade or they were never there and I have only just noticed.
Overall, nothing too stressful. The complete list of new features in 2.5 can be found here.