Recent Downtime
Hi guys, I'm sorry about that, I of course did not mean for the extra downtime but it happened so I feel it's time I explained.
I recently upgraded the ccoder.co.uk CMS, it now runs on .Net 4.0, I didn't however consider that my host webhosting.uk.com would not be .Net 4.0 ready so when I updated the site I broke it. This got me thinking about a few things .... the site hasn't really been used / updated in about 6 months until now and this was reflected in the forum so I took the opportunity to pull the forum down and get the website fixed and useful.
I have had many issues with the CMS mainly due to update in the silverlight framework which runs much of the underlying code for the administration and editor toolkit. I have since found that my frustration was because of a small but of course very forward bug in that I could build and manually attach to the process but if I used visual studio to do an auto attach it broke ... no idea how something like that might work but it took me some time to figure that out.
Once I had overcome that I found that the updated database could not be uploaded because apparently my database server (SQL server 2008) is also more up to date than that of my host. This was the final straw for me, so I built a few tools and bits that let me stream the entire db including creation and table / stored proc definitions and the data directly from my local server up to the host. I spent a good 2 days on this and ended up with code that worked but wasn't exactly very user friendly, maybe in the future I will build a synchronisation framework that allows objects to be passed between servers so CMS users can synch content between sites / friends sites.
Finally I got everything up on the server and how I wanted it and this took about a week in the end, I felt that to downgrade was no real gain from the start so the downtime was really a sort of blessing in disguise forcing me to set a new standard for ccoder.co.uk but despite that it still wasn't working.
The host informed me that .Net 4.0 was not currently installed on the server but was planned for some time in the coming week, so I made the call to wait it out.
The results are clear, I have a cleaner site running now which i'm finding much better to work with and easier to update already, I have some key bug fixes rolling out in the near future to help consolidate the platform then I begin documenting the entire platform.