Recently, I was tasked to implement a wiki using ASP.NET. After googling some possible candidates, I selected the wiki software created by ScrewTurn.

Here’s the basic information from the ScrewTurn site,

“ScrewTurn Wiki is based on Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5, meaning that you need a Windows operating system to run it, such as Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008. Desktop operating systems are supported by ScrewTurn Wiki Desktop Edition.

ScrewTurn Wiki can be extended and customized with plugins and themes. It can store data using a simple, built-in file-system provider or, if you need performance and scalability, it can use SQL Server or MySQL*. If you use Active Directory, you can integrate with that too.”

After downloading the latest release, version 3.0, installation was pretty straightforward. You can find install instructions here.

Initially, the application was using file-system data storage (local pages provider) to store the data (pages, users, files, cache and formatter). Due to the fact that we wanted to be able to use the users’ table from another application and integrate the wiki, I needed to migrate the wiki’s user data storage provider to a SQL Server implementation.

Logged in as admin, I attempted to enable the SQL Server Users Storage Provider (under Providers tab, selected User Providers radio button). Much to my dismay, it would not allow me to enable it (or even save a db connection string). Note: Enabling the SQL Server Storage Provider for Pages worked fine.

After googling for possible/known bugs, I was beginning to pull my hair out. Eventually, I was reading a miscellaneous tip from the ScrewTurn site.

“ScrewTurn Wiki requires the database to be set with a case-insensitive collation. You can use the following script to change it.

alter database [ScrewTurnWiki] set single_user with rollback immediate
alter database [ScrewTurnWiki] collate <your collation>
alter database [ScrewTurnWiki] set multi_user

Replace with a case-insensitive collation, for example Latin1_General_CI_AS.”

So far, ScrewTurn’s Wiki 3.0 is running fantastic and theme’ing it was very simple. Great job!