Rickard Nilsson

Day 3, the final day of Codegarden 2011, the annual Umbraco festival, is over and the Umbraco community is once again scattered all over the world. An interesting point that was maid during the round up was that only 250+ of the 200 000 active Umbraco users attended the conference. However, the fortunate part of the community, which were able to attend, is an awesome crowd with lots of really talented people. Thank you all for making it such a great experience.

Highlights from Codegarden 11:

Umbraco is the single most active project on Codeplex…

…Umbraco is teaming up with Mark Boulton Design to give users a better and more beautiful experience…

…Umbraco v5 CTP is available for download on Codeplex, the beta is scheduled for release later this summer and the final version will be coming at the end of 2011…

…v5 is a complete rewrite built on ASP.NET MVC with a solid foundation, rearchitected from the ground up using best practices, patterns, and frameworks like unit testing, IoC, DI, nHibernate, Autofac, etc…

…you can read all about and influence the development of v5 at http://jupiter.umbraco.org

…Deli is the new Umbraco package marketplace on http://our.umbraco.org where you can buy and, or sell packages…

…there are basically two approaches for implementing multilingual sites in Umbraco, either you duplicate the node structure per language, or use logic in your templates to get the language specific content from another sub document or property.

www.asp.net has run on Umbraco for more than a year now. Microsoft is planning to move MSDN and Technet to Umbraco as well, which means that Microsoft is really pushing Umbraco and because of this, Umbraco’s growth has escalated, even in the US.

…Courier 2 is the way to do continuous integration and deployment with Umbraco. There are no providers for TFS yet though…

…ClientDependency framework is a powerful tool for managing JavaScript and CSS dependencies in ASP.NET applications and has been an integral part of Umbraco since v4.

Finally, i give the conference 5 of 5 because its so much more than just a conference, actually more of a festival including great people, activities, sessions, service, and food. Very much recommended if you’re into Umbraco in any way.

Day 2 of Codegarden 11 has come to an end. And what and end it was. The infamous Umbraco Bingo brought the craziest things ever, including a marching girl band, a midget Elvis, a pillow fight, and the grand prize of getting a real Umbraco tattoo live on stage!

The conference, on the other hand, was a little slow, and for me it was mainly focused on the low level concepts, and patterns used in Umbraco 5, coming much later this year (se yesterday’s post). If day one contained very brief subjects with very little details, the second day was quit the opposite.

For me, the most interesting thing from todays sessions was the one on the ClientDependency framework. This is something that has been shipped with Umbraco backend since v4 but is actually a separate project on Codeplex, entirely independent of Umbraco itself. The framework provides a way to automatically manage JavaScript and CSS dependencies in any ASP.NET web application, using best practices like merging, minification, and compression, as well as automatically setting far future expire headers (I’ve written a post on minifying JavaScript and CSS before).

Tomorrow is the final day of Codegarden…

Codegarden 11 is an annual developer conference for everything Umbraco where everyone from casual users to core developers attend to learn, share ideas, network and socialize for three days in sunny Copenhagen. This year’s event is all about Jupiter – version 5 of Umbraco rearchitected on ASP.NET MVC, scheduled to ship later this year. Actually, the CTP was released live on the stage during the keynote.

Another exciting news from HQ, the company behind Umbraco, is version 2 of Courier, which promises to deliver automated deployment of content and developer artifacts to Umbraco, made really easy. They even dropped the price to 99€!

A new thing HQ are releasing now at Codegarden is Umbraco Deli, which is a marketplace for packages. Up until this point, there’s really been no place like this where you can sell licenses to your packages for download, other on your own.

The first day of Codegarden has come to an end and it’s been a really grate day for me, meeting all these new people which, are passionate about much of the same things I am. The day finished on a canal boat and after that the party continued into the night at a local office here in Copenhagen.

Looking forward to another great day!

Also follow my Codegarden experience through twitter, flickr, and Facebook.