1. Backups and double checking backups all round
2. I took a backup of the database and then restored it into a new database
3. I took a complete copy of the site on the file system of the server and pointed it at my new database in the web.config
4. Created a new site in IIS to point to this new folder with a subdomain of staging.newagestore.com

   At this time I now had basically a working replica of the site ready for upgrade.  This enabled me to work on the upgrade (which I had done locally first anyway just to check everything) without disrupting the live site.

5. Upgrade the database using the upgrade script provided

   Initially when I tried this on my local system I found a few problems.  Primarily these problems related to custom indexes I had added to a couple of tables in an attempt to increase performance.  On my test system I removed these custom indexes and was able to upgrade smoothly, so on the production server I dropped these custom indexes prior to the script being run.  It ran without errors, and at this stage I haven’t put the custom indexes back onto the tables… all seems ok for the moment.

6. Copy the new files into the new folder structure as per the instructions.

   This was actually a little messy.  The instructions say to do things like “delete the web parts directory”  the problem of course with this approach is that any custom web parts that you might have built will be wiped out if that is where you happened to store them.  I found that I had custom code in the app_code directory, cmsdesk/modules directory and cmswebparts directory.  So I of course copied this code out first, then deleted folders as per the instructions.

7. Loaded the site to let the upgrade to the database occur.  All smooth.

   When I did this step on my local system it appeared to get through OK however none of the new web parts etc were available in the CMS after the upgrade.  This did not happen on the production system, it all went fine.  So on the test system/local I went into the admin area and ran the import for the 3.1a to 4.0 as per the instructions and everything then came together ok.

8. Added back in my custom code.
9. Turned off the old site in IIS and turned on the new one and then changed the host header to www in the new site (instead of staging) and then changed the license key in the new site also.

So the result is an upgraded CMS website.  The average visitor is not going to notice the difference… yet!

The key reason for our upgrade was to take advantage of the new social networking functions, we were licensed for the enterprise version of Kentico and so are granted a license for the new social networking version of Kentico.  We haven’t turned on these tool on the site yet, we are just playing with a few different ways to bring them into the fold.

A few things to be aware for the upgrade:

• I had a couple of pieces of code that called the ‘executenonquery’ method of the data connection object.  This appears to be gone in 4.0, so in my case I simply converted these to ‘executequery’ with no real impact.
• Make sure you have all your license keys before hand.  I have a license for the main domain, plus subdomains of local, test and staging.  So I have few options for working things out before getting too stuck.
• The menu web part and the breadcrumb web parts appear to have a new property called ‘encode name’.  Maybe it was there in previous version and I just never saw it.  Anyway it doesn’t appear to have been updated correctly during the upgrade as some instances of this part have this ticked and other do not.  I had to go and manually chance the config of that part on those templates, no big deal but didn’t discover it until today.  The problem was that some of my breadcrumbs were being rendered as <span>divination</span> – blah – blah and of course I didn’t want the <span> tags visible.
• The standard blogpostpreview transformation seems to be missing one of the function calls that counts the number of comments for each post.  I have temporarily removed that element from the transformation just to get the blog posts working.
• One of the big changes in version 4.0 is module separation.  Kentico have moved around the structure of modules in the folder structure so that they are isolated from other parts of the site structure.  This is a better design but a little difficult to adapt the 3 custom modules I have built into this new architecture.  At the moment I still have my custom code in the old places and will need to move it all around when I can.

So in all a fairly smooth upgrade. Oh.. one more thing.  The sample community site that has all the social networking functionality is pretty cool, however there doesn’t appear to be a simple way of reproducing this functionality in a new site.  Unlike creating a blog which is a pretty quick process where Kentico does all the hard work of creating pages and webparts and configuring those, creating a social networking site appears to be something you have to do by hand from scratch.  I have a support call into them to see if there is a better way.