Setting up a Sitefinity Page Template to use Web Forms or MVC

When you use an existing Page Template in Sitefinity, you end up with either a Web Forms Page Template or an MVC Page Template.  This ultimately determines what types of Widgets you will be able to place on your Sitefinity pages.

However, what if you want to choose whether you are using a Web Forms Page Template or an MVC Page Template or if you want to use both (Hybrid Page Template)?

Well, unfortunately, you can only do that when you create a brand new Page Template as follows:

1. From the Design menu, select Page Templates
2. Click on Create a Template
3. Under Advanced Settings, select whether or not you want to use Web Forms and MVC (hybrid), Web Forms only or MVC only

Now, depending on which option you chose, will control what type of Sitefinity Widgets will be available in your toolbox!!

That is all there is to it!!

Using a blank Sitefinity Project as a reference project for Sitefinity upgrades

When you are working with Sitefinity upgrades from one version to another, you frequently need to determine what the reference blank project looks like from the newer version.

Well, fortunately, when you use the Sitefinity Project Manager, in the same directory as the ProjectManager or SitefinityCMS executable is a directory called _EmptyProject!!

If you look inside this _EmptyProject directory, you will see the complete directory structure for the corresponding version of the Sitefinity Project Manager executable.

Therefore, if you just downloaded Sitefinity v. 9.1, then the _EmptyProject directory will contain the reference blank project for Sitefinity v. 9.1 in the _EmptyProject directory!

So, if you are upgrading from Sitefinity v. 8.2 to Sitefinity v. 9.1, you can use a tool such as Beyond Compare to make sure the upgrade occurred correctly by comparing your upgraded project to the reference _EmptyProject directory.

Neat, huh??

Upgrading Sitefinity Web Application Projects

While upgrading Sitefinity versions in general has gotten easier over time, one of the MAJOR problems developers still face today even with the latest releases of Sitefinity is upgrading Sitefinity Web Application projects (especially when they are under source control).

The reason this remains a problem is because all of the Sitefinity Web Application project references are referring to the bin directory of the project.

Therefore, when you use the Sitefinity Project Manager, it appropriately updates the assemblies in the bin folder for you.

However, all of the Project References in the Sitefinity Web Application C# project file still refer to older assembly versions!

The problem originates from the fact that the specific version numbers are directly hardcoded into the .csproj file.

So, when you compile the application with these outdated assembly version numbers, the Sitefinity Web Application continues to think that it needs a particular assembly version to execute at runtime, causing innumerable problems for developers to resolve.

For example, you may have a reference like the following in your .csproj file:

<Reference Include="Telerik.Sitefinity.Frontend, Version=1.3.350.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b28c218413bdf563, processorArchitecture=MSIL">
      <HintPath>packages\Telerik.Sitefinity.Feather.Core.1.3.350.0\lib\net45\Telerik.Sitefinity.Frontend.dll</HintPath>
      <Private>True</Private>
    </Reference>

Instead, you probably want to have something like the following in your .csproj file:

<Reference Include="Telerik.Sitefinity.Frontend">
      <HintPath>bin\Telerik.Sitefinity.Frontend.dll</HintPath>
      <Private>True</Private>
    </Reference>

This change eliminates the direct assembly version dependency in the .csproj file as you noticed earlier and makes upgrades much more flexible.

If you are using a framework such as Sitefinity Feather which has available NuGet packages, then you will also want to make sure that you verify which version of Sitefinity Feather is compatible with your particular version of Sitefinity:

The update shown above for Sitefinity Feather works with Sitefinity v. .9.0, but if you are using an OLDER version of Sitefinity (such as Sitefinity v. 8.2), then you will need to ensure that you are choosing an appropriate version of the Sitefinity Feather assemblies that is compatible with your particular version (which is relatively easy to accomplish in Visual Studio 2015):

Once you have worked through all those hurdles in your Sitefinity Web Application project, hopefully you should be able to build your project/solution and compile a properly upgraded Sitefinity Web Application project!

NOTE: DO NOT REBUILD, just BUILD, since a REBUILD may wipe out all of the assemblies in the Sitefinity bin directory!!

Good luck with your Sitefinity upgrades!!

Precompilation of Razor View in Sitefinity Feather

I was recently making changes to my Bootstrap Layout templates as part of Sitefinity Feather when I noticed that my changes were not being applied!

Well, fortunately, I came across this Sitefinity Feather Forum post: http://www.sitefinity.com/developer-network/knowledge-base/details/how-to-turn-off-precompilation-of-razor-views-in-sitefinity-feather

After I turned this off and then applied changes to my Razor Layout view, I could then observe my Layout changes!

Removing the Brand text in the Bootstrap Navigation widget for Sitefinity Feather

If you have started working with Sitefinity Feather, you may know that they ship a Bootstrap Resource Package which includes a Navigation widget.

However, the problem with this navigation widget is that it maintains the text "Brand" at the beginning of the navigation bar with no easy way within the Administrative User Interface to override this text.

Well, fortunately, this can be done readily using some basic CSS!

.navbar-brand
{
 display: none !important;
}

That is all that is needed to hide the "Brand" text from the Bootstrap navigation!

FREE Sitefinity Developer Certification!

Telerik is currently offering the Sitefinity Developer Certification for FREE!!!

http://www.sitefinity.com/resources/training-and-certification/developer-certification

The Sitefinity Developer Certificate is FREE until August 1st, 2016, after which the exam will cost $200.

In addition, if you need to re-take the exam, you have to wait a minimum of 14 days before re-taking, so register as soon as possible!


If you have a PluralSight subscription, you can prepare for the exam using these 2 sets of videos:

http://app.pluralsight.com/courses/sitefinity-introduction

http://app.pluralsight.com/courses/sitefinity-development-introduction#intro-dev-sitefinity-m3-api

In addition, when you register for the Sitefinity exam on the Progress Education Community Portal, you also get 10 modules of training videos to review in preparation for your exam!  How cool is that??

https://wbt.progress.com/

Could not load file or assembly 'Telerik.Sitefinity.Resources' or one of its dependencies. Strong name signature could not be verified

I regularly monitor my hosted websites for possible failures and I recently received an alert for one of my Sitefinity websites indicating that it was no longer responding.

When I ended up accessing the website, I was faced with the following error message:

No matter what I tried in terms of shutting down and re-starting the site, refreshing the bin directory etc., nothing seemed to work!

I even did a file system comparison with the site running on my local virtual machine and the files were IDENTICAL!

Since I completely ran out of other ideas and options, I decided to try and upgrade my system from v. 8.1.5820 to v. 8.2.5900.

After completing the upgrade and re-uploading the new files to my hosted website, my site worked just as it did before!

I am still not sure of the exact cause of this failure of my hosted Sitefinity website, but if you also encounter this problem with your Sitefinity v. 8.1.5820 instance, a minor upgrade may resolve it for you as well!!

Upgrading Sitefinity versions just got easier!

In the past, upgrading Sitefinity from one version to the next has been inherently very difficult.

However, I was just recently upgrading one of my Telerik Sitefinity sites from v. 8.1.5820 to v. 8.2.590 when I was surprised to see the following screen:

In the past, I would have to wait for some incredible length of time wondering if the site was actually being upgraded or was simply hanging during the upgrade process, therefore, these informative screens are a most welcome change to the Sitefinity product especially when going through version upgrades!

Hopefully the Sitefinity team will continue to make these useful upgrades as they continue to work on and improve the product!!

The ContentViewDefinition with name DocumentsBackend does not exist in configuration files.

I recently attempted to access the Documents section of my Sitefinity v. 8.1 site when I was suddenly faced with the following error message:

Well I immediately suspected that the upgrade of my Sitefinity to v. 8.1 did not go as smoothly as hoped.

After contacting Sitefinity Support, I was informed of the following:

The error message stating that LibraryImagesBackend can't be found is due to the fact that this view has been replaced after Sitefinity 6.0 and is no longer in use.  The site must have started to experience this after upgrade passing through Sitefinity 6.0.

To resolve the error, force the upgrade to run again by making the below configuration change in App_Data\Sitefinity\Configuration folder in SystemConfig.config:

<systemConfig xmlns:config="urn:telerik:sitefinity:configuration" xmlns:type="urn:telerik:sitefinity:configuration:type" config:version="5.4.4040" build="4040">
<add name="Libraries" />

After restarting my site to trigger the upgrade, I could view my Images once again!

The end of an Era for Sitefinity and Small Business Owners

I have been using Sitefinity since v. 3.7 when the licensed edition still only cost $799.  Later, after Sitefinity v. 4.0 was released, the Small Business Edition version was released at a cost of $499 and the Standard edition price was subsequently significantly jacked up in price.

Not too long ago, Sitefinity got rid of their Sitefinity Community Edition, making Sitefinity no longer a viable option for non-profit, community or open-source projects.

Today, with the current release of Sitefinity v. 8.2, Sitefinity has done away with the Small Business Edition and now the cheapest edition of Sitefinity (Standard Edition) is priced at a whopping $3000! (http://www.sitefinity.com/editions)

Therefore, Small Business Owners that are looking for a reasonably priced and affordable ASP.NET-based Content Management system will now have no choice but to look elsewhere.

Sitefinity is now only priced for medium-sized to large corporations with big budgets to spend on their Content Management Systems for their publicly-facing websites.

Well, as a Small Business Owner myself and for all the other Small Business owners out there, I am saying so long Sitefinity, it was nice knowing you, too bad you could not stick around to meet our needs and budgets!!

Reinstalling Sitefinity Modules

I was recently experiencing problems with my Libraries module in Sitefinity, so I decided to Deactivate and Reactivate the Libraries module based on this article (http://docs.sitefinity.com/activate-and-deactivate-modules)to see if that would rectify the problem.

Unfortunately, that had no effect on fixing my issues.  So, after posting to a Sitefinity forum, I received the recommendation to go ahead and uninstall and reinstall the affected module.

This not only failed to work, it put the Libraries module in a "Failed" state thus making the module completely unusable at all!

Therefore, I was only left with the remaining option of deleting the module altogether.  What I did not know, though, was that there is no built-in method in the User Interface of Sitefinity to do a "clean" re-install of System Modules!

Lucky for me, the Sitefinity team keeps it pretty simple by storing this information in .config files.  In this case, the name of the Application Modules are stored in the SystemConfig.config file which is located beneath the App_Data\Sitefinity\Configuration folder at the root of the Sitefinity website.

I opened up the SystemConfig.config file and found this line under the applicationModules root:

<remove name="Libraries" />

I then removed this line from the SystemConfig.config file and re-started my Sitefinity website only to receive this dreaded error once again:

Well, I decided to look at the SystemConfig.config file once more and I now found this line in the SytemConfig.config file this time:

<add startupType="Disabled" errorMessage="Batch insert failed: Telerik.OpenAccess.RT.sql.SQLException: Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'pk_sf_presentation_data'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.sf_presentation_data'. The duplicate key value is (db0d628c-5471-4197-a94f-000000000003).&#xD;&#xA;The statement has been terminated. ---&gt; System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'pk_sf_presentation_data'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.sf_presentation_data'. The duplicate key value is (db0d628c-5471-4197-a94f-000000000003).&#xD;&#xA;The statement has been terminated.&#xD;&#xA;   at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.UpdatedRowStatusErrors(RowUpdatedEventArgs rowUpdatedEvent, BatchCommandInfo[] batchCommands, Int32 commandCount)&#xD;&#xA;   at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.UpdatedRowStatus(RowUpdatedEventArgs rowUpdatedEvent, BatchCommandInfo[] batchCommands, Int32 commandCount)&#xD;&#xA;   at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.Update(DataRow[] dataRows, DataTableMapping tableMapping)&#xD;&#xA;   at System.Data.Common.DbDataAdapter.Update(DataRow[] dataRows)&#xD;&#xA;   at OpenAccessRuntime.Intellitrace.Update(String id, DbDataAdapter adapter, DataRow[] rows)&#xD;&#xA;   at Telerik.OpenAccess.RT.sql.Batch.Perform(String connId, DbDataAdapter adapter, DataRow[] rows)&#xD;&#xA;   at Telerik.OpenAccess.Runtime.Logging.LoggingDbCommand.ExecuteBatch(DbDataAdapter adapter, DataRow[] rows, Batch batch)&#xD;&#xA;   at Telerik.OpenAccess.RT.Adonet2Generic.Impl.CommandImp.Execute(DbDataAdapter adapter, DataRow[] rows, Batch batch)&#xD;&#xA;   at Telerik.OpenAccess.RT.Adonet2Generic.Impl.StatementImp.Execute(DbDataAdapter adapter, DataRow[] rows, Batch batch)&#xD;&#xA;   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---&#xD;&#xA;   at Telerik.OpenAccess.RT.Adonet2Generic.Impl.StatementImp.Execute(DbDataAdapter adapter, DataRow[] rows, Batch batch)&#xD;&#xA;   at OpenAccessRuntime.Relational.conn.LoggingStatement.Execute(DbDataAdapter adapter, DataRow[] rows, Batch batch)&#xD;&#xA;   at Telerik.OpenAccess.RT.sql.Batch.ExecuteBatchDataTable(Boolean withInfo)&#xA;INSERT INTO [sf_presentation_data] ([voa_class], [app_name], [dta], [data_type], [date_created], [id], [last_modified], [nme], [ownr], [theme], [voa_version], [area_name], [condition], [item_id], [control_type], [embedded_template_name], [friendly_control_name], [is_different_from_embedded], [name_for_developers], [resource_assembly_name], [resource_class_id]) VALUES (@p0, @p1, @p2, @p3, @p4, @p5, @p6, @p7, @p8, @p9, @p10, @p11, @p12, @p13, @p14, @p15, @p16, @p17, @p18, @p19, @p20)&#xA;Batch Entry 0 (set event logging to all to see parameter data)" name="Libraries" />

I removed this line and instead replaced it with the following:

<add version="8.1.5820.0" name="Libraries" />

Making this change finally solved my problem with the Libraries Sitefinity Module!  Hurrah!!

Error CS0656: Missing compiler required member 'Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder.CSharpArgumentInfo.Create'

I was recently attempting to compile my Telerik Sitefinity Web Application in Visual Studio 2015 which included an MVC Controller which made a reference to the ViewBag property when I suddenly saw this error message in the Build Output which was preventing me from compiling my project succesfully:

Error CS0656: Missing compiler required member 'Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder.CSharpArgumentInfo.Create'

After doing some research on the error message, I discovered that Visual Studio 2015 for some reason was having trouble with the ViewBag property in my Controller!

As soon as I removed the reference to the ViewBag property from my Controller, I was able to successfully compile my Sitefinity Web Application once again!

Checking Sitefinity Project Feather progress

As you may know, Sitefinity Project Feather is an MVC-oriented project directed towards providing Sitefinity functionality to support ASP.NET MVC and Responsive Design frameworks such as Bootstrap.

Unfortunately, Project Feather is still behind on releasing all of the functionality that was originally released for Sitefinity with ASP.NET Web Forms support.

You can check out the progress of what has already been completed here: http://projectfeather.sitefinity.com/#/progress

Upgrading to Sitefinity v. 8.1

If you want to upgrade to Sitefinity v. 8.1 which now supports ASP.NET MVC 5 and .NET Framework v. 4.5, your original Sitefinity Web Application Project file will not automatically be upgraded with the correct project references. 

Therefore, you will have to correct and update these yourself.

The new references that you will have to update in your project for the ASP.NET MVC 5 Assemblies are the following:

• System.Web.Mvc
• System.Web.Helpers
• System.Web.Razor
• System.Web.WebPages
• System.Web.WebPages.Razor
• System.Web.WebPages.Deployment

 In addition, if you are using any Sitefinity MVC Widgets in your project, you will need to make sure you have a reference to this assembly:

• Telerik.Sitefinity.Mvc

 Once you have fixed up these assembly project references, you should now be able to successfully compile your project for Sitefinity v. 8.1!!

Sitefinity v. 8.1 finally supports ASP.NET MVC 5 and .NET 4.5!

As many current Sitefinity developers have known for many years, Sitefinity has been stuck on .NET v. 4.0 for many, many years and it only very recently added support ASP.NET MVC 4.

Therefore, with the release of Sitefinity v. 8.1, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Telerik Sitefinity team has finally upgraded and modernized the platform to both support ASP.NET MVC 5 as well as .NET v. 4.5!

You can read the release notes for Sitefinity v. 8.1 here: http://www.telerik.com/account/versionnotes.aspx?id=4223

End of Life for Sitefinity Community Edition

I have been using Sitefinity Community Edition for several years for several of the non-profit organization websites I have been working on, however, when I recently attempted to upgrade one of the websites to Sitefinity v. 8.0, I got an invalid license error message.

Well, after talking to the Sitefinity Sales team, it seems that the Sitefinity Community Edition has been discontinued/abolished!

These are the available editions of Sitefinity now:
http://www.sitefinity.com/editions

• Small Business Edition
• Standard Edition
• Professional Edition
• Online Marketing Edition
• Enterprise Edition

Small Business Edition still carries a $499 price tag so I can see many non-profit organizations turning elsewhere for free CMS systems such as Kentico (http://www.kentico.com/Download-Demo/Free-CMS-for-ASP-NET) or Orchard CMS (http://www.orchardproject.net/)

This turn of events is very unfortunate for many non-profit organizations that were previously using Sitefinity as their CMS, but hopefully they will find better free alternatives out there.

As for many of the current non-profit websites I work on today, I am planning on moving/migrating them to Orchard CMS due to their rich theme gallery and Orchard's native support for ASP.NET MVC and Bootstrap.

If you find some great free ASP.NET CMS alternatives to Sitefinity Community Edition, feel free to leave your comments below!

Troubleshooting Sitefinity Upgrades

If you have ever tried to upgrade from one release of Sitefinity to any later release, you probably already know that very few upgrades are seamless.

If your Sitefinity installation is a bit older and you want to upgrade to the latest release, then here are some troubleshooting steps to keep in mind while performing your upgrade.

As an example upgrade, I attempted to upgrade one of my Sitefinity v. 6.2 projects over to Sitefinity v. 8.0:

First of all, make sure you do the following before attempting to upgrade your project:

1. Make a backup of your current database
2. Make a backup of your entire site
3. Specifically look over the configuration changes in the App_Data\Sitefinity\Configuration folder as well as any Web.config changes and customizations.

Then using Sitefinity Project Manager, go ahead and perform the upgrade.  If asked to perform the Web.config upgrade, go ahead and do so.

Now, in many cases, the Sitefinity upgrade will not work flawlessly and will require several manual merges.  The best starting point is to create a brand new Sitefinity v. 8.0 Sample Project and use that as a comparison point using a comparison and merging tool such as Beyond Compare or any other comparison and merge tool of your choice.

Nearly all of the .config files in the App_Data\Sitefinity\Configuration folder will change from release to release, but these files in particular will probably remain much the same:

• DataConfig.config
• PagesConfig.config
• ProjectConfig.config
• SecurityConfig.config

In my case, there were minor changes to even the DataConfig.config file and the SecurityConfig.config file.  In the SecurityConfig.config file, I had to retain the main security information and just add the section to support Dynamic Field permissions.

All other files will probably need to be merged manually through a comparison of the latest .config files with your current versions.

One of the major problem causing .config file in nearly every Sitefinity upgrade is the SystemConfig.config file.

If this file does not get upgraded correctly (which is roughly 99.99% of the time), then you are guaranteed to encounter problems with running your upgraded Sitefnity application.  This file actually determines all of the modules that will be available in your application as well as how the database is to be upgraded.  Therefore, if the upgrade fails, you may end up with a database in an inconsistent state with the release version of Sitefinity on your file system.

Well, fortunately, there is a relatively simple workaround for this problem to re-upgrade your database.

After you upgrade your project, you may end up with a SystemConfig.config file like the following:

<systemConfig xmlns:config="urn:telerik:sitefinity:configuration" xmlns:type="urn:telerik:sitefinity:configuration:type" config:version="8.0.5700.0" build="5700" previousBuild="4910">

Therefore, if your Sitefinity upgrade failed, then your database mismatches what your Sitefinity installation is expecting.  In order to rectify this, you can revert the version information of your SystemConfig.config file to force the upgrade once again like so:

<systemConfig xmlns:config="urn:telerik:sitefinity:configuration" xmlns:type="urn:telerik:sitefinity:configuration:type" config:version="6.2.4910.0" build="4910" previousBuild="3450">

The next time you run your application, it should attempt to upgrade the database as well as update the SystemConfig.config file to match the latest version of your Sitefinity installation.

In addition, you may have numerous modules in your SystemConfig.config file such as the following:

<applicationModules>

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Multisite" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="Scheduling" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="Search" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" version="5.1.3450.0" name="News" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" version="5.1.3450.0" name="Blogs" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" version="5.1.3450.0" name="Events" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="Libraries" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Forms" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="Lists" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Analytics" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" version="5.1.3450.0" name="Newsletters" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="GenericContent" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="ControlTemplates" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" version="5.1.3450.0" name="Migration" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Ecommerce" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" version="5.1.3450.0" name="ModuleBuilder" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="ResponsiveDesign" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" version="5.1.3450.0" name="Publishing" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" version="5.1.3450.0" name="Forums" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="Thunder" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Personalization" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="SitefinityDAM" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="MobileAppBuilder" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="SharepointConnector" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="EverliveConnector" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="MarketoConnector" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="SalesForceConnector" />

        <add version="6.2.4910.0" name="Comments" />

    </applicationModules>

These will all have to be updated to match the correct release versions for your Sitefinity installation:

<applicationModules>

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Multisite" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Scheduling" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Search" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="News" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Blogs" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Events" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Libraries" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Forms" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Lists" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Analytics" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Dashboard" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Newsletters" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="GenericContent" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="ControlTemplates" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Ecommerce" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="ModuleBuilder" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="ResponsiveDesign" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Publishing" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Forums" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Thunder" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="Personalization" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="SitemapGenerator" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="SitefinityDAM" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="MobileAppBuilder" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="SharepointConnector" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="EverliveConnector" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="MarketoConnector" />

        <add startupType="Disabled" name="SalesForceConnector" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="DataIntelligenceConnector" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="Comments" />

        <add version="8.0.5700.0" name="RecycleBin" />

        <add startupType="OnApplicationStart" version="1.2.120.0" name="Feather" />

        <add title="Audit Trail - Elasticsearch" description="Logs audit events to an Elasticsearch instance." moduleId="00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000" type="Telerik.Sitefinity.Audit.Elasticsearch.ElasticsearchAuditModule, Telerik.Sitefinity.Audit.Elasticsearch, Version=8.0.5700.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=4d437ae15f42fd43" startupType="Disabled" name="ElasticsearchAudit" />

    </applicationModules>

Next, you may have to merge your Web.config file to match any of the latest changes.

Finally, since your Visual Studio project references are no longer valid, you will probably have to merge your Visual Studio project changes with the latest project changes and re-compile your solution.

If you have done all of the above, you can now try re-running your application.  If all went well and your application runs without throwing exceptions, you have successfully upgraded your Sitefinity application to the latest release!

Sitefinity v. 8.0 has been released!

Sitefinity v. 8.0 has been recently released!  It includes many enhancements as part of the Sitefinity Feather Framework as well as numerous other new features.

You can check out the Release Notes here: http://www.sitefinity.com/product/version-notes/sitefinity-8_0

Configuring IIS for Sitefinity

If you are hosting your Sitefinity website on IIS 7 or above, there are a slew of configuration changes you have to make to IIS in order to be able to properly host Sitefinity without any IIS error messages.

Fortunately, the Sitefinity team has provided a set of PowerShell scripts that you can download from the "Automatic Configuration" section on their Sitefinity Documentation page:  http://docs.sitefinity.com/configure-the-iis-to-host-sitefinity-projects

I ran the required PowerShell scripts for my installation of IIS (IIS 8.5) and all of the error messages that I was encountering suddenly went away!  Yippee!!

Limitations of Sitefinity v. 7.x

If you are using Sitefinity v. 7.x, here are some MAJOR limitations to the platform that might influence whether or not you consider migrating to the Project Feather platform (when it is released):

1. The Sitefinity project is still built on .NET v. 4.0.  There is no .NET v. 4.5 (or v. 4.5.1) release nor are there any current roadmap plans to add support for .NET v. 4.0.  While .NET v. 4.5 is a minor change from .NET v. 4.0, it still requires Web.config changes.  In addition, features that are specific to .NET v. 4.5 and above (such as Model Binding in ASP.NET Web Forms) are not available because Telerik still references the .NET v. 4.0 assemblies and not the native .NET v. 4.5 assemblies.  Of course, you can spend countless hours upgrading the project to support .NET v. 4.5 all around, but what happens each time you want to run an upgrade??  If time is money, you can easily spend thousands of dollars supporting upgrades to Sitefinity just to run .NET v. 4.5 (and who really wants to go through that hassle)?
2. The Sitefinity project includes Telerik.Reporting assemblies but you cannot use them with Visual Studio 2013 because the assemblies don't support integration with Visual Studio 2013.  There is also no roadmap plan to include later versions of these assemblies.  Therefore, if you decide to use newer versions of these assemblies, it will also require additional assembly redirects in the Web.config (and always having to deal with this with each subsequent upgrade)
3. The Sitefinity project still references ASP.NET MVC 4!! In addition, if you want to support ASP.NET MVC 5 and the features included with MVC 5, you are probably out of luck since even the latest release of Sitefinity v. 7.1.5200 does not yet support MVC 5.  You may be able to update and upgrade all of the Web.config files and the associated project references to add support for MVC 5, but once again you will have to deal with this on each and every project upgrade.  

On the bright side, Project Feather (http://projectfeather.sitefinity.com/) seems to be more loosely coupled than the original releases of Sitefinity since v. 4.x, but there is no clear direction as to when Project Feather will become integrated into the mainstream release of Sitefinity or if it will remain as a side project all on its own.  As of this writing, Project Feather still only has support for ASP.NET MVC 4 and has not been formally released to RTM.

So, if you are currently doing modern development using all the latest technologies and versions (Visual Studio 2013, Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC , Web API and .NET v. 4.5 or later), you may well be out of luck until the Sitefinity team decides to update and upgrade their current solution or at least wait until Project Feather is released to see if it holds a brighter future than the current release of Sitefinity.