Without following standard precautions I decided to just slam the upgrade into place without making any backups of the database or the website folder.
Fortunately, I was not disappointed!
The latest version, 4.5.1, did take a long time to become active after copying the files, modifying the release.config and renaming it to web.config and then browsing to the site, but after an hour or so, the site finally came up without hesitation.
Perhaps just my slow server, but that is a long time.
I never got any progress page. Just a blank page with some text changes in the status bar every once in a while. There are a number of errors in the event log, but without pursuing any of them I just waited and finally the site came up.
I hope this does not happen with my production sites for my clients.
