Upgrading EPiServer to version 6

With the new EPiServer 6 now available to the masses, upgrading current EPiServer sites is something we’ve all been looking forward to.

I was tasked this week with upgrading a pretty large website we’ve current got in EPiServer 5.2.375.236.

There’s a nice little upgrade utility that comes with the EPiServer Deployment Center and this was my first port of call. I knew there’d be more to it than simply using the upgrade wizard however this handy utility did the majority of the work.

I then headed over to the EPiServer CMS folder on my local machine to grab the required DLLs from the “6.0.530.0″ folder, dropped these into my websites DLL folder and updated all my references in Visual Studio. Bingo! Right? Well almost.

After running the project for the first time I came across the following error message:

Cannot resolve dependencies for the following module(s)
EPiServer.Cms.Shell.UI.InitializableModule
EPiServer.Cms.Shell.UI.InitializableModule
EPiServer.Web.InitializationModule
EPiServer.Web.InitializationModule

The error is quite clear and I knew that some dependancies were missing, I just didn’t know which ones.

After some digging around and much testing, it turns out that not all of the required DLLs are present in the “6.0.530.0″ folder (C:\Program Files\EPiServer\CMS\6.0.530.0 – on my machine).

Doing a quick *.dll search in the CMS folder I found a zip file containing a full EPiServer project with a complete bin folder (C:\Program Files\EPiServer\CMS\6.0.530.0\VSTemplates\EPiServerProject.zip – on my machine).

This bin folder contains 35 dlls where as the “6.0.530.0/bin” folder only contains 26 dlls.

Copying all of these new dlls to my DLLs folder, updating my references in Visual Studio once more and running the project now works as expected

EPiServer 6 is looking really slick and the admin panel has improved hugely.

I’m hoping that this post will be of help to all EPiServer developers finding they have the same problem. Having searched Google for a good couple of hours yielding no helpful results on this one, I hope this post will be of much help.