The purpose of this article is to assist you in preparing your ASP/.NET website(s) for our upcoming Cloud Sites maintenance.

What changes are being introduced during this maintenance?

• We will be standardizing on the MySQL .net connector 5.2.5
• We will be installing .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1
• We will remove support for Visual J# on our clusters in the DFW data center.

NOTE: These changes support Microsoft's scheduled end-of-life date for .Net 3.5 and Visual J sharp of July 12th, 2011.

NOTE: For a list of known issues and breaking changes for ASP/.NET within .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1, please click here. 

What does this maintenance mean to you?

While we don't expect any downtime or disruption, we wanted to reach out to you to provide adequate notice to allow you to make any necessary changes that may be needed due to the upgrade of .Net Service Pack 1 or the removal of Visual J# support.

How do I know what cluster my website(s) are on?

You can check to see what cluster your website(s) are on by viewing the Staging URL.

How can I prepare for this change?

You can test the upcoming changes by simply creating (provisioning) a new "testing URL". If you need assistance with creating a new testing URL, please visit the article, Adding A New Website. Once you have setup your "testing URL", you will now want to move a copy of your current site to the testing domain. You can do this by copying your website from the live site, and then loading the copy to the new, testing domain.

• NOTE: If you have any databases, you will also want to make a backup of the database, and then import this into a new database on your testing domain.
  • Here is an article that will show you how to use MyLittleAdmin to create a backup and perform a restore of your MSSQL database(s).
  • Here is an article that will show you how to use the zip and unzip commands on the server via cron. You can also use FTP to move a copy of your website to the testing domain.

Finish Line

Once you have created your new testing domain and moved a copy of your website(s) over to it, you can now view your website on clusters that are already using the MYSQL .net connector 5.2.5, running .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 and no longer carry support for Visual J#. At this time, you may need to make modifications to your site to ensure its functionality. A few additional things to consider:

1. You might need to make some modifications to how your default documents are handled in your web.config. We have an article that will show you how to properly set your default document that can be viewed here.
2. You might need to modify how your MIME types are defined in your web.config. We have an article that will assist you with properly defining your MIME types here.