Mini Post – DotNetNuke and web.config problems
I could have Twittered this but I wanted to put it here: Every now and again I find myself refreshing my developer's copy of my project on my local computer from source control.
The way I have source control is primitive and probably incorrect. I tend to save ALL of my project (DotNetNuke included) into source control, so when I get a clean setup, I can basically run it out of the box.
This particular time, I was working with a different database than I normally do. Because of this, my source control wrote over my web.config and copied the wrong database settings, which resulted in the web.config pointing to a no-longer existing database.
When I loaded up my website, I was greeted with the installation wizard from DotNetNuke. "Okay," I thought, "Perhaps I forgot to update this particular database with the new DNN version." I clicked on next a few times and realized it was just the wrong database being referenced. I changed the web.config to be the correct database and credentials and all was well...
Or was it?
I loaded up my project and I was getting rather unhelpful "I need to put a ScriptManager on the page in order to use AJAX.net" error. I just couldn't figure it out! It worked before! Long story short, the DNN install wizard messed around with the web.config and broke a few things configured specifically to my install. Once I pulled up an older web.config, everything worked perfectly.
This wasted about 2 hours of my time (which I don't really have) and was easily avoidable if I was paying attention.
Lesson learned: Always be methodical with processes which you perform regularly. If something strange goes wrong within the process, it probably doesn't belong and should be approached very, VERY carefully.
