I'm happy to announce the release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.8. 

Data Layer Consolidation

The primary focus of this release is consolidating our support for SqlAzure into our main MS SQL data layer so that we don't need to maintain a separate data layer for SqlAzure. For new installations that use SqlAzure, you should just use the package for MS SQL. If you have an existing installation using SqlAzure, you should follow these steps:

1. Upgrade using the mojoportal-2-3-4-8-sqlazure-net35-deploymentfiles.zip or mojoportal-2-3-4-8-sqlazure-net40-deploymentfiles.zip depending on whether you are using .NET 3.5 or 4.0
2. Copy your connection string from the SqlAzureConnectionString to the MSSQLConnectionString
3. Download mojoportal-2-3-4-8-mssql-net35-deploymentfiles.zip or mojoportal-2-3-4-8-mssql-net40-deploymentfiles.zip again depending on your .NET version.
4. Extract the files and copy the mojoPortal.Data.dll, mojoPortal.Features.Data.dll, and WebStore.Data.dll from the MS SQL package and replace them in the /bin folder your installation
5. Going forward we will no longer have separate packages for SqlAzure, so for future upgrades you will just use the MS SQL package

Important - We no longer support MS SQL 2000. Our MS SQL Data layer is compatible with SQL 2005/2008/SqlAzure

As I mentioned in my previous post, we also now have a package for SQL CE. I encourage you to give it a try. It would be really cool if someone out there could do some load testing of mojoPortal using SQL CE and then using MS SQL to get an idea of how well SQL CE can handle traffic. I would not expect it to do as well as MS SQL but I think it might hold up better than one might expect. My guess is it can handle more traffic than the Sqlite version of mojoPortal because Sqlite only supports 1 connection and SQL CE does have a connection pool and supports more connections.

In the near future I will be looking into using WebMatrix which is the tool that can be used to migrate from SQL CE to SQL Server. WebMatrix could also be used for light mojoPortal feature development for those who find Visual Studio to be a little scary. WebMatrix is also a pretty neat tool for trying applications from the Web App Gallery and it includes IIS Express.

New Date Picker

This release also includes a new jQuery DatePicker. You could still use the old one if you like it better by changing the default DataPickerProvider in mojoDatePicker.config in the root of the site.

I also added jQuery UI styling to the buttons in most of the included skins (except Artisteer skins since they already have button style). You can enable it in a custom skin from the theme.skin file by adding this:

<portal:mojoButton runat="server" UsejQueryButton="true" />

A Few Bug Fixes

• fixed a bug where using Live Writer an error would happen when trying to open existing posts
• fixed a bug in the blog where the rating was not shown even on the detail page if using excerpts
• fixed a bug in the blog where the default comment allowed days was being ignored
• fixed a bug in Feed Manager where the aggregate feed link did not work in child sites
• fixed a few bugs in the Sqlite data layer where the paging logic was not correct

Updated Italian resources from Diego Mora

Updated Dutch translation from Bouke Bisschop

As always, it is a good idea to backup your site and database before upgrading.

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