Using Visual Studio 2005 Pro with DNN 4.3.5.  Looking for a way to keep the hosted website and the development environment in synch. 

I am a longtime software developer in other environments (too many to mention over the years).  One of the things I find difficult to deal with in the DNN paradigm is making major changes to a website.  Small changes of course are easy enough: just change the HTML directly in the web browser.  But I strongly feel that big changes to a website (for example, adding a Store) should be made in a local development and test environment. Only when these changes are properly tested should the changes be moved into production (the hosted website). 

The difficulty comes from keeping the two environments in synch.  If I make a change in  production, I want to easily bring down this change to development and vice versa.   You can do a straight copy (ftp) of all the DNN files from to a website but moving database objects is more difficult, especially in a hosted environment where the database is a SQL Server 200X database and not a SQL Server Express database.  Since most hosting providers will not let you run a SQL Server Express database on their servers, you have to do a database export of the SQL Server 200X  database on the hosted website and then import the database back into SQL Server Express.

It seems that keeping the two environments in sych should be a feature of DNN.  A DNN website should have a facility to copy itself into a development enviroment such Visual Studio.  Based on the same reasoning, a DNN website should also have the capability to copy itself from a Visual Studio development environment to a hosted webserver.

Any advice on this issue would be appreciated.

Thanks for your attention,

Stefan Pantu

Computer Software Connection, Inc.
southfloridakiteboarding.com

A more detailed description and partial solution to this problem can be found at

www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/ForumsDotNetNuke/tabid/795/forumid/108/threadid/91071/scope/posts/Default.aspx

Note that the main difficulty with keeping the web site  in synch is that most hosting providers force you to use SQL Server 2005 rather than SQL Server Express which is used in development.  If the db used on the host is SQL Server Express, it may be as simple as ftping the .dbf file to/from theApp_Data directory along with all the other DNN source files.

Yes, I've thought of changing permissions on page(s) under developemnt.  It's a good solution when adding individual DNN pages to the web site.  In other words, making simple changes to the hosted web site.

But there are DNN components that I need to change without affecting the web site on the host. 

For example,  I want to install and test a third party's DNN module or other component.    I'm sure that the component was tested by the third party but the last thing I want to do is bring down a customer's revenue generating site.  In theory, you can uninstall any component in DNN but if some thing goes drastically wrong, you are stuck with having to restore your customer's site from backup.  For some hosting providers, you are looking at up to 24 hrs of website downtime.

Here is another scenario.  Let's say DNN comes out with version 5.0.5 that uses .NET 3.0.  You think "ok, it's version 5.0.5 so they got all the big bugs out of 5.0".  You try to install over your existing 4.3.5 installation.  All hell breaks loose and your website goes down.  It takes up to 24 hours to restore the site from backup.

Yet another scenario.  You need to show off the website you just  built but you are at a meeting room without internet access.  Only way to do this would be to copy your website to your laptop.

One more.  You are a developer using VS 2005 and your are debugging a new DNN component. Your users may be making changes to the production website that can affect your code. You need to download local copy of the hosted website to test your newly created code.

So there is a clear need  for DNN to have a facility for copying a DNN web site frm the host and vice versa.

Thanks for your attention,

Stefan Pantu

Computer Software Connection, Inc.

southfloridakiteboarding.com