Areas, Bucketwebs, Upgrade and Redirects

Many of you are excited to know that bucketwebs are going away.  WooHoo!  No more http://portal/c4/c15/market%plan or /c15 whatever.  A customer recently was worried about conflicts that would occur when the bucketwebs were flattened to their structure.  With one portal it is impossible to have conflicts for areas as they are upgraded to sites.  This same customer was interested in getting at the bucketwebs and understanding where the redirects are going.  Below is some sample code that was given to them.

Talking with the new owner for upgrade in O14 (code name for next gen SharePoint Server and next wave of Office) Sean Livingston, yep my ol' buddy from MS IT turned WSS PM!  He mentioned that he used Windiff to determine what had changed.  Made me laugh.  Windiff is something I would pull out as well.  In fact it's the first tool I'd pull out to determine what is up.  Consider using a VM or another server that you know is OOB and do a diff on the product install directories, home directories, etc...  It will amaze you how often people are changing the out of box files that you wouldn't expect them to change.  Some of them are trivial and some are complete rewrites.

Good Area upgrade info on TechNet 

Here's a snippet of code from Boxin Li that may help you locate those bucketwebs and where they redirect (post upgrade).  Note: Requires that this be run with elevated permissions. 

SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()

{

                using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://server"))

                {

                                using (SPWeb web = site.RootWeb)

                                {

                                                SPList list = GetListFromUrl("/Lists/98d3057cd9024c27b2007643c1");

                                                // use list.Items

                                }

                }

});

It’s possible to crawl through webs/folders/files and interrogate SPFile.ForwardLinks in the OM if you really want to see what links we fixed up. 

Boxin also had a recent post on the SharePoint team blog on Area upgrade that was really good...  How to Upgrade an Area based on a Custom Site Definition.  I did a post a while back on Resources and Recommendations for Upgrading Site Definitions and Site Templates. 

If you are reading this post and enjoying it then maybe you are interested in helping me out.  I'm looking for a customer/partner that would help build a technical case study on upgrade of site customizations and/or site definitions.  I'm looking for someone who can put together best practices and lessons learned that would turn into an article on TechNet.