Our first Umbraco 7 build
by Kenn Jacobsen
@illumidk
- illumi
and Dan Okkels Brendstrup @illumidk - illumi
The Session
A detailed walkthrough of our experience building our new corporate website on Umbraco 7:
- Switching from 100% XSLT to 100% Razor. We've been very vocal XSLT proponents, but for this project we built everything in Razor. We'll describe in detail where this proved an advantage, where it caused frustration, and what it means for the division of labor between frontend developers and C#-skilled backend developers.
- What Umbraco 7 improves in our daily version control workflow, and how we've solved the remaining problems with our own package to serialize doctypes and macros to disk.
- What we had to change in our TeamCity-based build setup to automatically build Umbraco 7 solutions, and the problems we had to solve when we upgraded our build server (that also runs lots of older Umbraco solutions) to .NET 4.5.
- Configuring the new backend interface for the best editor experience, working around packages that weren't updated yet, and building a custom property editor.
- What we're looking forward to in our next Umbraco 7 builds, and what we see as the biggest advantages for both developers and editors compared to earlier Umbraco versions.
The Speakers
Dan has been building Umbraco sites at Illumi since the days of version 4.5, drawn to the platform by its extensive XSLT usage (yes, really) and the power of having an entire website available as an XML structure. He enjoys constructing meaningful editor experiences in Umbraco, was an early adopter of the responsive mindset and is an eager proponent of solid frontend performance.
He’s a defiant Mac user, and spends his days coding in Vim and grunting on the Unix command line. Taking full advantage of Kenn’s hard work to make it possible, he hopes to hold on to his editor freedom while opening his mind to the bright Razor-powered future of Umbraco 7.
Kenn has been in the industry for over 10 years, exclusively on the .NET platform and almost exclusively within the web universe. He's been working on three different continents on all kinds of projects, from designing and implementing application life cycle management at Vestas to building configuration software for fighter jets at the US Air Force.
For the past three years he's been with Illumi doing Umbraco projects and spending a fair amount of his time working with automation, continuous integration and deployment. He is also the author of the Umport and uCommerceSync packages, and more packages are in the works.