At the SharePoint Conference in Vegas two weeks ago I co-presented a session with Chris Johnson from Microsoft on how to upgrade a SharePoint 2007 Publishing site to SharePoint Server 2010. We covered some pre-upgrade stuff, things to watch out for, but what I think was likely the most interesting piece of the whole session was when we took a content DB backup of a 2007 site, restored it and added it to SharePoint 2010 (using a similar process I wrote about previously) and then modified created a new master page from the sites custom branded 2007 master page and added the 2010 stuff like the ribbon and developer dashboard.

It was a fairly easy process believe it or not… what I liked about the demo was we intentionally ran into a few errors along the way (yes, those were expected for those who were in attendance) because I wanted to show what a real world process looked like. For those of you who were at the conference, I had also written one of the hands on labs available to attendees (#321) that walked you through the process on the SharePoint Server2010 Beta 1 / tech preview build.

This week I had planned to write a nice detailed blog post on how to do this exact same thing in beta 1 and beta 2, but in the process of poking around the beta SDK on MSDN I blogged about the other day, I noticed there’s a great page already there explaining the same process I was going to write about! Why reinvent the wheel, esp. considering the MSDN page has a lot more detail in it than I planned to add.

» MSDN SharePoint Server 2010 Beta SDK - Upgrading an Existing Master Page to the SharePoint Foundation Master Page