I had a chance today to try out the Rainbow Portal 2.0 Beta. So far, I'm pretty happy with it. Of course, I struggled with the a checkout of the dev code for a while because I don't have Visual Studio .NET 2005, but once I restarted with a download of the zipped application, the installation went OK.
The only problem I encountered during setup was a Configuration Error (see below):
Configuration Error !
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.
Parser Error Message: Unrecognized attribute 'xmlns'.
It turns out this is a problem of IIS trying to make the application use the .NET 1.1 framework. It can be forced to use the 2.0 framework by changing the application's ASP.NET settings (In IIS Manager, right click your Rainbow application, Properties, ASP.NET; then choose the .NET 2.0xxxx framework).
I even had a go at converting one of my more simple custom modules from Rainbow 1.1 to 2.0. It was pretty painless too...
- Open the module's csproj file in C# 2005
- Run the conversion in C# 2005 to convert the project to .NET 2.0
- Remove the references to Rainbow, Rainbow.Settings, and Esperantus DLL's
- Add a reference to Rainbow.Framework.Core.DLL
- Build, and start troubleshooting code issues (mostly namespace issues in my experience)
- Once those issues are out, you add the module to the portal just as in Rainbow 1.1.