I received some excellent advice from the gang at the Sharepoint LinkedIN group this week regarding the setup of a virtual development environment.  One of my areas of focus has been Sharepoint development.  You might recall that Sharepoint 2010 was released earlier this year, which is great news!  However, for those of us running 32bit test servers, it wasn't such great news because the new version of Sharepoint will only run on x64 machines.

I had a few options that involved some monetary or time investment:

Install Sharepoint 2010 on my Windows 7 desktop.  It's a x64 system and complies with the minimum requirements of Sharepoint.  The downside is that it clutters up the system with extra overhead and the application is not leveraging the full capabilities of a server. Upgrade my x86 test server.  This old Dell has been a trooper.  It runs Windows Server 2003 and has been used as a test environment for my client projects.  I used it to do some web part work in MOSS 2007.  Clients can...

There is much debate about which Content Management System (CMS) is the "right" one to use.  My blanket answer is:  It Depends :)

The key to selecting a CMS is to evaluate the functionality needed for the website, the project budget, and the ease of use for both admins and content publishers.  A big plus is to acquire a CMS that is open source, meaning that custom modifications can be made to the source code in the event that the CMS does not offer the functionality needed "out of the box". 

When evaluating a CMS, the first thing I consider is the web server that will be running it.  Some CMS's run natively on Linux/Unix servers and are at their best in that environment.  The next thing is to look at the website's functionality.  If the site will be for personal use or blogging, consider Wordpress.  If E-Commerce functionality plays a role, be sure to look for shopping carts that integrate with your CMS.  Another issue is theming or skinning your site.  I suggest looking at what it takes to create...

I try to strike a careful balance between staying on the bleeding edge of technology and waiting for new feature sets to be implemented, tested and improved before applying them here.  I was installing DotNetNuke 5.4.2 on a client's dedicated server last week and had a thought:  Does WebDBApps need to be upgraded to the current version of DotNetNuke?

Survey Says:  Yes!  We were running version 5.1.4. 

Our hosting provider allowed us to move to an IIS7 server so that we could offer clients the ability to leverage the features that play especially well such as ASP.NET 4.0 and MVC2.  So, since I was in upgrade mode, I downloaded all the DNN upgrades up to 5.4.2.  My first attempt failed miserably, and here's some advice to those of you looking to follow the same process:

Always backup your SQL Server database and website files!!!  Never upgrade DNN until this is accomplished. Ensure that read and write permissions are granted to your entire wwwroot directory.  This really tripped me...