We have just finished a successful upgrade from Umbraco V3.0 beta to Umbraco V4.1.2 and all went well. It was not an upgrade in the sense of applying updates patches, instead, more of a case of redesigning the entire site on a seperate URL and transferring existing content across.

V3.0 beta has served us very well for the past 2.5 years, however, we decided it was time to upgrade not only to stay current, but also to have our blog integrated into our website. We were previously using dasBlog, which as a stand-alone blog is excellent. The only problem is that it was not integrated into our site and thus got neglected. This is evident in the lack of entries of late. We have also done a lot of work "packaging"certain plugins into Umbraco V3 final and now V4 and therefore wanted to make use of these ourselves.

As i said the transfer went without problems except for two things:

1. Existing virtual application under the root stopped working
2. Links from dasBlog and the existing website would need to be re-directed to the updated URL

The first problem was easy to fix as we have implemented the location web.config setting to handle this. For those who are not aware of how to allow your site to have virtual directories underneath, you just need to add the wrap your <system.web> in a location setting - i.e:

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
      <system.web>
      </system.web>
</location>

We did have one issue with existing application that were DotNet 3.5. For some reason we needed to comment out the following in the web.config. still not sure of the exact reason why.

<sectionGroup name="scripting" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35">
<section name="jsonSerialization" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingJsonSerializationSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="Everywhere" />
<section name="profileService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingProfileServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" />
<section name="authenticationService" type="System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingAuthenticationServiceSection, System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" requirePermission="false" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" />

The handling of broken URL's was fixed very easily with Casey Neehouse's 404 Redirect Control. It is not readily available for download, but if you get hold of him on his website or on the umbraco forum he will send it onto you. Easy to implement and does what its meant to do!

So, there we have, a brand new theme and an up to date umbraco installation!