Using Visual Studio 2005 Pro with DNN 4.3.5.  Looking for a way to keep the hosted website and the development environment in synch. 

I am a longtime software developer in other environments (too many to mention over the years).  One of the things I find difficult to deal with in the DNN paradigm is making major changes to a website.  Small changes of course are easy enough: just change the HTML directly in the web browser.  But I strongly feel that big changes to a website (for example, adding a Store) should be made in a local development and test environment. Only when these changes are properly tested should the changes be moved into production (the hosted website). 

The difficulty comes from keeping the two environments in synch.  If I make a change in  production, I want to easily bring down this change to development and vice versa.   You can do a straight copy (ftp) of all the DNN files from to a website but moving database objects is more difficult, especially in a hosted environment where the database is a SQL Server 200X database and not a SQL Server Express database.  Since most hosting providers will not let you run a SQL Server Express database on their servers, you have to do a database export of the SQL Server 200X  database on the hosted website and then import the database back into SQL Server Express.

It seems that keeping the two environments in sych should be a feature of DNN.  A DNN website should have a facility to copy itself into a development enviroment such Visual Studio.  Based on the same reasoning, a DNN website should also have the capability to copy itself from a Visual Studio development environment to a hosted webserver.

Any advice on this issue would be appreciated.

Thanks for your attention,

Stefan Pantu

Computer Software Connection, Inc.
southfloridakiteboarding.com

This is something that concerns me, too. What I am doing now is testing out new modules, changes, etc. on my localhost. If those work, I then upload those modules, etc. to the remotehost. After the remotehost changes are finished, I download the DNN files from the remotehost and copy down a backup of the database that the host does each night, then restore both the DNN files and database to my localhost.

Has anyone tried any of the tools at Red Gate software to automate this process?

---

Chris

depending on what package you buy from redgate, they include a command line utility that you can use to automate the db comparison.. i used this with much satisfaction in the past...

---

Erik van Ballegoij, Former DNN Corp. Employee and DNN Expert

DNN Blog | Twitter: @erikvb | LinkedIn: