I just went thru the Issue 22 videos and I expected to learn very little as I frequently migrate my production site to localhost, and very occasionally migrate it back.

As it turned out I discovered how to make multiple portals work, which will help with some offline demos my wife has scheduled next week.

There were a few things that I though that I’d share with the forum users.

·         The first is have a development strategy. Know what is going to be developed on your production server and what is going to be developed on your local host.

In my case I develop new content on hidden pages on the production server, and applications on the localhost. Since my apps are usually ListX-based they are easy to migrate by themselves. When I am at a good point in development I clone the production server on my localhost.

The advantage of content development on the production server is that all of the URL tweaks that Lee showed how to fix don’t appear broken when viewed on the localhost. However, any content (Text with Images) developed  in a localhost environment may have to be “fixed” when moved to the production server.

·         The second thing is that Lee’s video work well for the first time that you move a site. However, there are differences when you are uploading over a live site. There are also differences when restoring the database over an existing one vs. doing a database creation as part of the restore.

I recently was stupid in loading a DNN module, which I wasn’t using onto my production server without testing it locally. It messed up my database to the extent that I had to role back to the night before’s backup.  The ISP has an automatic process for this, similar to Lee’s.  However, if anyone accesses the site during the restore, the restore fails with no error message. I didn’t use the app_offline file, and don’t know if it would have helped. But to solve the problem I had to have the ISP do the restore to a new database, then alter the web.config.

·         There are other ways to deal with the connection strings. I have both my production and localhost in a common web.config, and just move the two ending comment à markers as required.

    <!-- Power DNN Connection string

         providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> -->

    <!-- Vista IIS7 SQL Extress connection string after attach

    Make sure you make Nt Authority owner of dbo! -->

    <add name="SiteSqlServer"

         connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLExpress;Integrated Security=True;Initial Catalog=ASI3"

         providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />

·         You will notice that I don’t use uid / password for the localhost and that my ISP has the SQL server running on the same system.

I went to look for your Ace FTP and it appears to be $30 shareware. I have been using Filezilla and it works great. It allows assigning an editor to be used via FTP. I assigned Visual Web Dev Express and now it is easy to view and/or  tweak web.config and other files.

Lee Issue 22 was great - keep up the good work,

/DaveS