Ho ho ho

Yeah I've seen this issue many times - the only solid method that seems to work without issue is to make a backup of your database and basically let DNN create a new one!

I get this issue because my team use Visual SourceSafe to keep the current portal (and our custom modules) under source-control however whenever I upgrade the DNN portal we run into problems - the process goes like this...

1. I backup my web.config and DNN database
2. I download and unzip the latest upgrade package over the top of the current portal.
3. I merge the changes in my web.config with those shown in release.config
4. Start the portal and the upgrade works as expected.
5. Checkout all changed files from SourceSafe (without getting local copy) then check everything in.
6. When other team members do a "get latest" and restart their local instances of the portal - it appears to do the upgrade but when the link to access the portal is clicked - nothing happens - a DNN "White Screen of Death"!
7. I have tracked the issue down to something weird happening in the URL rewriter module and I can fix the problem be getting each team member to unzip the SQL upgrade scripts directly from the zip file rather than getting them from SourceSafe - are these files unicode or something?!
8. I hope to do a SQL comparison of the two databases and find out what has gone wrong... Some error messages would be nice though guys...