In our efforts to make developing Umbraco based sites and
packages more painless we are releasing a collection of NuGet
packages and Visual Studio templates for Umbraco 5. So if you are
using Visual Studio to develop Umbraco based sites, your life just
got a little easier ;)
NuGet Packages
I hope you already know about NuGet, but if you don't here is a
short description "NuGet is a free, open source developer focused
package management system for the .NET platform intent on
simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into
a .NET application during development", and I would encourage you
to check out the project page on Codeplex.
We have created 11 NuGet packages that can be used for different
purposes, which I will try to describe below
Umbraco.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Framework.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Framework.Persistence.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Framework.Security.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Hive.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Hive.Providers.IO.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Hive.Providers.Membership.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Cms.Web.Editors.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Cms.Web.ParameterEditors.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Cms.Web.PropertyEditors.5.0.310.0.nupkg
Umbraco.Cms.Web.Trees.5.0.310.0.nupkg
As you might have guessed the main package is
Umbraco.5.0.310.0.nupkg, which is used to setup an Umbraco 5 MVC3
based site in Visual Studio. So to install it you simply go to the
Package Manager Console and write:
"Install-Package Umbraco" and boom! you have an
Umbraco solution ready to roll (to install the package you can also
right click on references in your project and search for the
package in the NuGet feed). After installing the package you just
need to configure the project to use IIS Express (Visual Studio
2010 SP1 required) or setup a new site in IIS and you should be
ready to go.
A majority of the other packages are dependencies to the main
Umbraco NuGet package, but can also be used independently. Say you
want to create a Hive provider you would simply type
"Install-Package Umbraco.Hive" and all the
dependencies needed to create a custom Hive provider will be added
to your project. The last four packages listed above are intended
for developers who want to create a custom Editor, ParameterEditor,
PropertyEditor and/or Tree with corresponding naming.
We hope that you will find these packages useful in the
development of Umbraco 5 based sites or packages. All feedback is
welcome.
Visual Studio templates
In addition to the NuGet packages and to help getting started
even easier we have also created a collection of extensions for
Visual Studio 2010 in the form of project templates. You can find
these templates by going to the Visual Studio Gallery or searching for them in
the Online Gallery from within Visual Studio -> Go to the Tools
menu, click Extension Manager and in the select the Online Gallery
pane in the dialog. Search for Umbraco 5 and you should get these
six results:
Umbraco 5 MVC3 Project Template - A project
for creating an Umbraco 5 based ASP.NET MVC3 web application
Umbraco 5 Hive Provider - A project template
for creating an advanced Hive provider with Entity, Revision and
Schema Repositories
Umbraco 5 Simple Hive Provider - A project
template for creating a simple Hive provider
Umbraco 5 Parameter Editor - A project
template for creating a custom Parameter Editor
Umbraco 5 Property Editor - A project template
for creating a custom Property Editor
Umbraco 5 Tree - A project template for
creating a custom Tree
You can choose to install the templates that you would find
usable be it one of them or all of them.
All of the project templates uses the NuGet packages for
dependencies, so the Umbraco 5 MVC3 project template would give you
pretty much the same result as installing the Umbraco NuGet
package, but since its installed as an extension you will have it
in the list of projects when you select New -> Project in Visual
Studio and you would get a complete solution setup with a few
clicks.
The rest of the templates contains a base structure for creating a
simple or advanced Hive provider, Parameter- and Property Editor
and finally a Tree with a Menu Item.
The two variations of a Hive provider contains the classes
needed to get up and running, and with the dependencies and
settings wired up to give an overview of how everything is tied
together.
The ParameterEditor, PropertyEditor and Tree templates also
contains the base classes for a simple version of an Editor or
Tree, which should be easy to extend if needed.
We hope that you will find these project templates useful and
that they'll help you get started with Umbraco 5.
Again, we would love to get your feedback on these templates. If
you have suggestions for additional templates that you would like
to see feel free to drop us a comment.
If you would like to bend any of these predefined templates to
your needs you can easily create you own - fork the source on
bitbucket:
https://bitbucket.org/sitereactor/umbraco-5-templates-for-visual-studio/src
Finally, if like the templates we have created please give them
some stars on the Visual Studio Gallery