How to open an old Visual Studio project?

From time to time, we have a newer version of Visual Studio and have problem open older project because of the non-support by the new Visual Studio. We can force open it by changing the <ProjectTypeGuids>.

e.g. I wanted to run the project NerdDinner. I couldn't open it directly by Visual Studio 2013. The program refused the upgrade the "Web" project "NerdDinner" ("NerdDinner.Tests" was ok). So, I edited the NerdDinner.csproj. From this page, I know the MVC project type guid of different version of MVC. So, I changed from version 2 (F85E285D-A4E0-4152-9332-AB1D724D3325) to version 3 (E53F8FEA-EAE0-44A6-8774-FFD645390401). It then compiled and run fine.

Now, we can upgrade the nuget packages and bring up the references so that it works well with the newer version of Visual Studio and .Net framework. That's another story though.

Deploy a .Net CMS to Godaddy

When one needs to deploy a full fledged package to Godaddy for web hosting, it may go wrong while running perfectly in your local machine. I've deployed both nopcommerce 3.3 and Orchard CMS 1.8.1 to Godaddy. Here a few things to remind everybody if the support is not helpful:

1. turn on the system error message
1.  <customErrors mode="Off"/> within the <system.web> envelope in Web.config
2. give full trust level
1. By putting "<trust level="Full" />" within the <system.web> envelope in Web.config
3. go to the "File Manager" of godaddy and give the "Application pool group" (e.g. IWPG_xxx) Full Control permission on your "httpdocs" folder.
1. Reason: your package may like to write a few files when starting up. After initial startup, you may like to take away the "Full Control" and limit to a few folders only. e.g. "App_Data". It is up to you but you need to do in a trial & error basis since if you are not the coder, you may not know when & where it needs to create a file. Also, there may be a media folder that allows user to upload "media". You need to give at least "Write" permission to that folder.

As always read the error message rather than panic, it may remind you what is going wrong.

My Part 09

Sipke Schoorstra's tutorial on writing a shopping cart module in Orchard CMS is really nice. However, the information is two years ago and newer version can't work with the code. He has some upgraded to the newer version of Orchard but it is stopped at Part 08.

Part 09 is esp. important since it will complete to order cycle.

I went through the page and upgraded the code to make it compatible with Part 09.

(Not sure if I can put the code public since the owner is Sipke and just I modified it to make it work with new version of Orchard CMS)