Migrating to Windows 2008/IIS7 on DiscountASP.NET

I finally bit the bullet and migrated my horribly old and un-cool IIS6 account (including this blog) to Windows 2008/IIS7 here on DiscountASP.NET. The process was mostly painless, but not glitch-free.

Automated migration tool

It took me a while to find it, but dASP does have a (theoretically) completely automated migration tool. You no longer have to submit a support ticket to be migrated as it was back in the day:

https://my.discountasp.net/windows2008-migration.aspx

After reading a few disclaimers and confirming that I was aware of about 12 different breaking changes in dASP’s Windows 2007/IIS7 implementation, I was off and migrating!

[more]

And 10 minutes later

I wasn’t told exactly what went wrong, but the takeaway here is you really need to be prepared for a larger than anticipated outage if dASP’s migration tool fails or you have other complications configuring your applications. From start to finish, including contacting support a couple times, my site was down for over 24 hours before all was said and done.

Configuration Changes

The good news is that once the migration had finished, there were just a few quick things I had to take care of, excluding application-specific configuration issues:

• All directories set as an application root have to be reset
• Update your FTP username in your client (it changes)
• Confirm IIS default document settings/order

In the case of the last bullet, I’m not sure whether the IIS default document order was changed or if the migration process actually added an index.html file to my web root, but my root was pointing to the dASP starter html page and not my application’s default.aspx page after migration. No big deal, quick fix.

Upgrading BlogEngine.NET to Windows 2008/IIS7

I actually avoided the upgrade primarily because I was worried BlogEngine.NET wasn’t going to play friendly with IIS7, but it appears I was wrong. My blog seems to be working right out of the box without any changes at all!

The official BlogEngine.NET install instructions do have a few comments on IIS7 and resolutions to possible problems – check them out if you are having problems getting it to run on IIS7.