The last week-end I wanted to give a try to the install of the free and open-source content management application, named Orchard. I knew before that Orchard is based on the .NET framework 4.0 and that could cause some issues with my existing blog engine (dasBlog). Nevertheless, I decided to take the chance and to try to make then working together.

First, the deployment. This is really simple as I took the Orchard web which only needs to be copied on the web server. This did not cause any problem.

Then, update of the configuration and this became more difficult. I had to make the blog engine virtual directory to specifically use the .NET 2.0 framework and breaking the inheritance of web.config, using the <location> element. The Orchard install then went almost fine, but the blog was in a very bad state, complaining that the file eurl.axd/[AVeryBigNumber] was not found.

In fact, as soon as you set your IIS root application to run the .NET framework 4.0, no matter the configuration inheritance is broken or using the .NET 2.0 framework using a dedicated application pool, the sub virtual directories detect that the version 4.0 is present. For a complete explanation, please read the ASP.NET 4 breaking-changes whitepaper.

The conclusion of this journey is that I had to revert back to a plain .NET 2.0 runtime in order to have this blog back up and running.

Thanks to the Brinkster support team who spend long time to help me and to try different configurations on the server. But unfortunately, except having another web site, there is no solution, as changing a registry value is of course not possible in such environment.