No, we don’t offer a hosted version of ScrewTurn Wiki, but we might in the future. If you could help us understand if and how that would work for both you and us, it would be very nice of you. How? Simply answer this very short survey: http://goo.gl/4yt2d.
Obviously, any comment, suggestion or critique is more than welcome.
Today we’re refreshing the Alpha release of ScrewTurn Wiki 4. Here are the notable changes and additions:
So, this release marks an important point: no major architectural changes are planned for the new version. This means that what we have to day, unless it’s absolutely necessary, won’t be changed significantly and thus the data you create and save with this release will be upgradable to the next v4 releases.
In this short post we’re going to learn how to deploy STW 4.0 (still in pre-release at the time of this writing) to Windows Azure.
Navigate to the Windows Azure Development Portal (windows.azure.com) and sign in with your Live ID. From the home page select Create a New Storage Account.
In the Create a New Storage Account form fill in the domain name; this domain name, which is always in the acme.cloudapp.net form, is global so you may need to fiddle with it a bit to get a name that is not already in use by another service.
It’s a good idea to create an affinity group to ensure that storage and hosted services that use it are located in the same datacenter, reducing bandwidth usage and increasing performance. Affinity groups can also specify a preference for a geographical region so that service and storage are as close to your users as possible to minimize network latency.
Click OK and you’ll see a summary page for your new storage account.
After downloading the Windows Azure Table/Blob Storage package, you have to tell ScrewTurn Wiki to use your new storage account. To do that open the ServiceConfiguration.csfg file with your favourite text editor and modify the ConnectionString setting:
Now you have to create a new Hosted Service.
From the Hosted Services summary page select New Hosted Service.
In the Create a New Hosted Service form fill in a friendly name for your service and the domain name. Choose a geographical region or, if you have created it, select the affinity group.
You can then select the Deploy to Production Environment option and after creating a name for your deployment upload the Azure.cspkg and ServiceConfiguration.cscfg files.
Click Ok to start the deployment.
An alert pop-up will appear warning you that your deployment has one role with only one instance. You can just click Yes and continue the deployment or modify the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file changing the value of the Instances setting from “1” to “2” or more:
<Role name="WebApplication">
<Instances count="1" />
<ConfigurationSettings>
...
ScrewTurn Wiki 4 natively supports multiple independent wikis within one application instances. Each wiki must be bound to an dedicated host address, for example:
The fun here is that the wikis, while being completely independent, all live in the same application instance, saving server resource and significantly reducing the burden of keeping STW up-to-date.
If you want to deploy ScrewTurn Wiki on Windows Azure with support to multiple wikis you have to edit the Wikis setting in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file before publishing it.
The names of wikis must separated by a pipe and for each wiki you can specify one or more hosts separated by semicolon:
<Setting name="Wikis"
value="root=|support=support.acme.com|hr-intranet=hr.intranet.acme.com|dev-intranet=dev.intranet.acme.com" />
The “root” wiki, which is mandatory, also acts as fallback for all unknown hosts.
There is a caveat: on Windows Azure, you can only specify one host for each service. In order to access your multiple wikis, you’ll have to create multiple CNAME DNS records, all of them pointing to host of your Azure service (e.g. acme.cloudapp.net), quite easy, but that is required if you want multiple wikis.
Today we’re releasing the first Alpha version of ScrewTurn Wiki 4.0.
The main change in this release is the brand-new search engine, completely based on Lucene.NET.
The new search engine is available on all storage engines:
This is an important improvement as the new search back-end is faster, more accurate and it finally supports wildcards, so you can search for “local*” or even “locali?ation”. Way cool.
Tomorrow we’ll also publish a guide on how to deploy ScrewTurn Wiki 4 on Windows Azure. Stay tuned!
Today we’re releasing a CTP refresh for our brand-new 4.0 line. This new version completely replaces the old flat file-based default storage engine with a new one, built with SQL Server CE 4.0. From the outside, everything will work the same.
The rationale behind this decision is very simple: it became too cumbersome for us to maintain two main data storage providers. Using SQL Server CE allows us to use almost the same code for both SQL Server CE and the larger editions of SQL Server. This became particularly important if you consider that we now also have a storage provider for Azure.
You can download the compiled application as well as the source code right from our v4 CTP page. If you’re a dev, don’t forget we have a Mercurial repository at BitBucket.
To build the source code you’ll need to have SQL Server CE installed on your machine (we can’t redistribute the binaries with the source code), but to run the application, you will not need it as it’s set to CopyLocal.
Next up: new search engine based on Lucene.NET.
After almost 10 months since the last 3.0 release, today we’re releasing version 3.0.5.600. It’s basically a bugfix release and here is the changelog:
As you can see in the last item, we finally abandoned Visual Studio 2008 in favor of 2010. The solution still targets .NET 3.5 (STW 4.0 will target .NET 4).
For those of you having problems with sorting in the wiki index (AllPages.aspx), given that a fix requires architectural changes that will be implemented only in version 4, we added a workaround, which is the possibility to specify the number of items to display in long list. By setting a large number, paging is disabled altogether, thus mitigating sorting problems.
We’ve been working like crazy since last February to build a first version of ScrewTurn Wiki that runs natively on Windows Azure.
We’re all very happy to announce that the first Community Technology Preview of ScrewTurn Wiki 4.0 is now available. We have a dedicated page on our main website where you can download the compiled packages as well as the source code, plus get access to our public Mercurial repository.
Here is a list of the changes made to it (not only for Azure!):
It’s important to note that:
Known issues:
As said, this is not a final release and here are some of the things we want to implement:
What would you like to see? It’s time to come up with ideas!
P.S.: Big thanks to Microsoft and especially to Dirk Primbs for the support they’re giving us in this effort!
We’ve rebuilt the Visual Editor backend from scratch, and it’s now available in beta in our development builds. You are now able to switch to WikiMarkup and back faster, but above all with less errors and glitches. Of course, feedback would be highly appreciated.
Regarding actual editor features, they remain unchanged at this moment, but now that we have a more robust HTML-to-WikiMarkup processor, we can start working on new features and improvements to existing ones.
On a side note, we moved our public Mercurial repository to Bitbucket and we improved those formerly known as nightly builds. We now call them development builds because they’re not built daily, but rather every time changes are pushed to the repository (actually, they come right out from our integration server). This is a huge improvement because, if we fix a bug, you’re able to download an updated compiled package of ScrewTurn Wiki in less than 5 minutes, instead of waiting 24 hours. Cool!
This is mostly a public service announcement.
We’ve migrated ScrewTurn Wiki’s repository to Mercurial, and a public clone is now available at http://bitbucket.org/screwturn/screwturn-wiki. Also, we migrated from Unfuddle to Codebase specifically to support Mercurial and public access to our issue tracker.
If you are one of those many users who run a customized version of ScrewTurn Wiki, I imagine that merging changes into a new application version was never easy. With Mercurial you can now do that more easily. Let’s see how.
Firstly, clone STW’s repository:
hg clone http://bitbucket.org/screwturn/screwturn-wiki ScrewTurnWiki
Re-apply your changes, possibly with a patch and merge tool, then commit them into your local repository.
hg commit -m "My super mod"
Every time we push new changes into our repository, you can simply pull them into your clone and easily merge them with your customizations:
hg pull hg up hg merge hg commit
This way you get the benefits of version control for your very own changes without the burden of merging them with our updates. Cool!
You may have read that we recently shipped, in collaboration with Lokad, a production website built with ScrewTurn Wiki and hosted on Windows Azure. Well, that’s just the first step to fully support Azure as runtime environment for your favorite .NET wiki engine.
Today we’re officially starting a new project, that will be like this:
We’re big fans of Windows Azure. It’s a very interesting way to host web applications, and above all it allows to scale easily. Even if you don’t need a lot of computing resources, with a few dozen Dollars/Euros a month, you’d get a two-instance web role with 99.95% availability and reliable storage. It makes sense both from a technological and economical point of view.
Moreover, we’re supported directly from Microsoft. They’re happy to see an open-source project hardly working to support their cloud computing platform, and we’re excited to start this new journey.
To help us with this effort, a new developer is joining our team to work on ScrewTurn Wiki full-time. This is the first time in more than four years that someone will work exclusively on STW, so trust me when I say that it’s something groundbreaking.
This is the perfect time to say hi and offer to help us out. So far we failed to get contributors because we somewhat demanded continued efforts. That doesn’t work, so we changed our minds. We’re fully opening our issue tracker (more info on that in a few days), so feel free to drop us a line if you want to help with something, even if it’s very small and only takes little effort.
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