Migrating Tridion templates from 5.2 to 2009

Upgrading a Tridion environment from Tridion 5.2 SP1 to Tridion 2009 SP1 isn’t a straightforward procedure, especially when you have to cope with a lot of custom functionalities. In this post, I write down some experience whith the upgrade of the old templating framework to a new one.

Tridion 5.2 situation

The templating framework used in 5.2 (pre-compound templating) was we built as a ScriptExtension in C#, and this ScriptExtension was registered one in the Tridion MMC snap-in. All the present VBScript based templates call this ScriptExtension with some templating parameters. This templating setup is very easy to deploy (register one dll and you're ready to go),

The drawback of this solution was the usage of the Tridion COM API, and the managed to native interop issues you have to deal with (like releasing your references to COM objects), but with Tridion 5.2 (and before that, with Tridion 5.1SP4) it worked.

First try, migrating this solution to 2009 SP1

While building our solution with Tridion 5.1SP4 and 5.2SP1, you had to built the Interop assemblies yourself. With version 2009, Tridion delivered these in the bin\client folder of the Tridion installation. Linking the existing solution to these new assemblies, fixing small API changes and recompiling the whole worked like a charm. But testing the code gave some major issues. The internals of the deployment packages changed for binaries and was killing the custom metadata for indexing purposes. But the whole publishing process became a large memory hog. So it was needed to rewrite the solution (or restart the TDSE process once in a short while). That was basically what was done, the legacy rendering and publishing was ditched for the new way of publishing and rendering content.