Skipping 7.x -> 8.x and upgrading NuGet based version

Hi guys,

We currently have 7.x setup in Azure and while the notion of upgrading to 8.1 is appealing, I'm thinking I'm just going to skip the upgrade and wipe the system clean to do a 8.1 setup from scratch.

The reasoning behind this is that a) MVC has changed versions (which is never an easy upgrade) b) Azure SDK has been (finally) bumped from 2.2 to 2.6 c) Feather is updated (and it seems to be integrated now?) and d) we're haven't even released the DEV/TEST version to users let alone a production version. With this many changes it just seems the upgrade is going to be painful so I might as well just start fresh. While I could use this an upgrade test opportunity, I think there are so many moving parts that changed this is just going to kill me.

Also I went down the path (based on a Telerik/Falafel best practice video I saw) of removing all the default "bin" versions of Sitefinity DLLs and switching the entire project out to use NuGet. I think this is right thing to do (for sure with Feather it was as we did so many updates over the last couple of months in DEV) but I'm wondering if this practice is still a best practice?

Is setting up the 8.1 version clean now and going through the same process (remove all Sitefinity references, switching to NuGet, etc.) is still the way to go? Will this be a better upgrade path for the future (not to mention not having to worry about my "bin" folders getting blown away) or is there a better option now with 8.x?

Thanks!

I think it is best practice to use the nugget sources. It has made my life a bit easier and faster.

Once thing to be careful of is that the internal builds get updated every 2-3 weeks so one day its 5801 then its 5802 then 5803. If you have accompanying class libraries or decide to add one later you need to pay attention to the right version. Else you may hit version conflicts. It may be easy\safer to always do it through the console rather than the UI.

As for 7.x to 8.1

I would be inclined to start a new from what you say. Though I have updated a 5.x to 8.1 recently. (Though it did have one major that required Sitefinity support) But have also done plenty of 7.x up to 8.x