Upgrading from Sitefinity 4.0 to 4.1

Hi,

Just to prep you, I am about to criticize.

We have an open ticket for an issue we're having upgrading, so don't feel like you have to give a solution here.  Basically, we are having trouble with the instructions to upgrade sitefinity written here:

www.sitefinity.com/.../upgrading-sitefinity-projects.aspx

and here:

www.sitefinity.com/.../adding-an-existing-project-to-the-project-manager.aspx

Guys, we are on 4.1 of sitefinity, and it still seems like sitefinity upgrades are a hassle.  Why do I need to use the project manager for upgrades?  Why do I have to modify XML to get the project manager to see en existing project?  Upgrading sitefinity should be as simple as

1) Updating DLL's, and config files, preferable in a single directory,

and more importantly

2) Running a database script. 

On the latter, you should take a look at how Rails does database migrations and the .NET libraries that do the equivalent.  Pointing sitefinity to my production database and hoping for the best scares me.  I'd much rather run an entire script or a series of scripts in a transaction that I can easily rollback, so I don't have to mess with a backup and restore scenario.  An automatic upgrade of the database make sense for people for end users if Sitefinity were like Wordpress, where you just install it and you don't have developers do upgrades or install add ons.  But thats not how it works--developers have to get involved in any upgrade.  Well that being the case, let me actually get in there and see whats going on and run the database scripts and move the DLL's myself.  I may in fact have the DLL's in a different place than the bin, (using a LIB folder for 3rd party DLLs is sort of a best practice now) so I don't expect a magic upgrade through the project manager to completely work. 

You guys need to start treating your developers as actual coders instead of having us rely on magic that may or may not work and cannot be tweaked for specific projects. 

These aren't the only possibilities for making Sitefinity easier to upgrade, just some ideas of the top of my head.  Maybe the sitefinity community has other ideas or feedback.  It seems however that when I use an open source project doing an upgrade is relatively straight forward.  With sitefinity it is usually painful. 

I'm sick of this conversion. Tough to understand the language too.

Should have been easier to do it.

Let me know how it goes, I just started.

Yes, in support of this original post: it seems like a manual upgrade process could be reverse engineered, with some file and db comparisons of before and after. But why not get these details from Sitefinity staff? 

They must be able to generate a list of updated files and db objects between various versions, which could be translated into a SQL update script and a set of manual file edits and updates.  This would be very useful to me, instead of having to go through the odd, standard Sitefinity upgrade.  With this, I'd feel like this is a more supportable product.  As-is, it seems too unreliable and difficult to do upgrades.

Paul

Hi ,

The upgrade proceudure with the project manager is less painful in my opinion. If you need to modify Project.xml file copy the xml entry for you old project and change this