.NET 2.0 arrived on Thursday and so I updated my server on Friday to install the .NET 2.0 runtime to get several of my ASP.NET apps running on the release build. I’ve been running for quite a while ‘blind’ with several of my server applications running on Beta 2 on the live server, while running the RC here on my dev machines. Since there had been some changes in the framework some of my code compiled for beta 2 wouldn’t run with the RC, so it’s been a couple of months of making changes to my applications offline only without synching back up to the server… needless to say that’s a bit unnerving – knowing you have a few bugs in the online code and not being able to immediately fix it <g>… (well, I could have fixed it with beta 2 code, but I was trying to avoid that).
Server Update
Anyway on Friday afternoon I swapped out the .NET runtime for the release version and recompiled and uploaded my applications to the server. The process went pretty smooth and I’m happy to say that things went up and running quickly. Well, almost quickly – two months of diffs have taken their toll actually. There were a couple of application level configuration changes that ended up crashing a couple of the Web apps for about a half an hour until I figured out that there was an invalid Enum value used in the old configuration files.
A few things to watch out for are web.config changes. Between Beta 2 and release there have been a few name and value changes for newer web.config entries. In the end I found my bug by simply replacing the web.config completely and seeing if the app would run and sure enough it did. Plug it back in and – boom. Rather than troubleshooting my rather large Web.config setup I just uploaded my local copy and adjusted the handful of keys that require customization.
So far so good. I notice that performance appears to be a bit snappier than previously both on the server and here on my local dev machine, although the big bummer still continues to be application startup which is as slow as ever. Once the app’s up an running things are smooth. Looking at my error logs I see nothing out of the ordinary – in fact a number of those little bugs I’d not been able to fix during the beta mismatch are gone thankfully.
Installing VS.NET Release
I guess the above was the easy part but this sort of server surgery is always a bit unsettling. Hence the approach of doing the update on Friday afternoon just before the ISP crew goes home. But in my experience .NET Framework installs have always been a pretty painless experience. The framework install is pretty non-intrusive and it seems like it has minmal impact on the system as a whole - only on the .NET portions. The Framework is painless, but it’s VS.NET that’s a *major* pain to install.
Well not quite, this time around at least. If you’re planning on installing VS.NET 2005 release ontop of Beta 2 or the Release Candidate or any other CTP/SQL Server 2005 install and you want to make this experience quick an easy check out this link and download the Uninstall Tools described in Aaaron Stebner’s WebLog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/10/27/485987.aspx
I have one machine in my office that’s had all sorts of CTP/Beta versions of all sorts of Microsoft .NET 2.0 stuff installed and it managed to clean up that machine and cleanly install VS.NET on it! Even if you don’t have a messy machine the tool works much easier than uninstalling all the various components in the right order. This time was the first VS.NET install that I've done where there wasn't some sort of package load error - where was this tool during all those painful beta installs <g>…
I ended up installing VS.NET Pro since I don’t see the individual Team editions yet. I’m preparing for a number of sessions I’m doing and I’ve still been having a number of issues with the RC in the VS.NET IDE. According to Microsoft a number of these haven’t been fixed for RTM, but I want to make sure. It looks like Microsoft is trickle releasing the various .NET versions with the various Team editions other than the full team package not released yet. Or maybe my MSDN information hasn’t updated yet… <shrug> I guess I’ll be uninstalling re-installing VS before too long.
Let the games begin
Now the real work begins. I’ve been slacking off getting ready for 2.0 too long I guess and I wasn’t quite prepared for release to actually be early. I spent a good part of the weekend recompiling various projects and making adjustments to get them ready for 2.0.
My biggest issue is Help Builder related updates that deal with importing .NET 2.0 specific type information (Generics is supported now to some degree) and getting the Help Builder Add-in to work in VS.NET 2005. The latter is turning out to be a real pain – there are lots of little things that have changed and some not so little things. More on these issues in another post I guess.
Question of the day
Here’s an interesting thought. The distributable for the .NET 2.0 runtime is actually slightly smaller than the distributable for the 1.x version of the runtime. According to Microsoft the 2.0 version of the runtime adds a huge amount of functionality – how is it possible that the footprint hasn’t changed?
.NET Runtime 2.0:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/downloads/updates/default.aspx
VS.NET 2005 Beta Cleanup Tools:
http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/10/27/485987.aspx
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