Upgraded to Community Server 2.1 beta 1

Finally I managed to update my site. I already missed the last major step from 1.1 to 2.1. However, during the last few weeks the number of spams increased daily. Because CS 2.0 introduced a spam checker, I decided to bite the bullet. Of course I took the harder route: Not only updating from CS 1.1 to CS 2.1 beta 1, but from .NET 1.1 to 2.0 as well. Surprisingly it went smoother than expected:

1. Shutting down my site. ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a new feature: if you put a file named App_Offline.htm in the root of a web application, ASP.NET will shutdown that application and just send back the content of this file to every request for dynamic pages. (More details by ScottGu)
2. Upgrading the database: first I applied CS_1.1_to_2.0_upgrade.sql from the CS 2.0 distribution, then cs_2.0_to_2.1Beta1_upgrade.sql, and finally cs_ASPNET2_Membership_Schema_Update.sql because of the migration to .NET 2.0.
3. Uploading all the files for CS2.1b1. Quite time consuming because I took the chance to clean up my web space.
4. Fixing my post names. Even more time consuming. I used to give my post descriptive names, which was not well supported by CS in the past. However, they fixed it, but now all URL of my posts are broken. That’s because CS now encodes the post name, and all hyphens were converted to _2D00_. So I went through all my posts and fixed their names. (that’s the first time I’m glad that I’m not posting so much [;)])
5. Finally I deleted App_Offline.htm again and reviewed all settings in the control panel.

So everything went pretty well. However, the site is not skinned yet. But I refrain from going to the time and effort of creating a decent design until CS2.1 is released. Instead, I’ll invest some of my spare time in some CSModules.