West Palm Beach .Net User Group August 2010 Meeting With Chris Rushing

Sam Abraham — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:47:40 GMT

The West Palm Beach .Net User Group would like to thank our August speaker, Christopher Rushing, Owner and Senior Developer at Webangelo, LLC for coming to our meting and sharing his knowledge about Umbraco, an open source ASP.Net CMS. Umbraco presents an out-of-the-box solution for implementing systems that can be as simple as user blogs to as involved as ecommerce high traffic websites. It can also be easily extended and supplemented with standard ASP.Net User Controls.

Umbraco is already a very well known enterprise-level CMS in Europe. With reputable, high traffic sites such as Microsoft’s asp.net adopting Umbraco, one can only expect continued adoption and reputation growth for this promising CMS domestically.

--Sam Abraham

A Closer First Look at Umbraco Development In Microsoft WebMatrix

Sam Abraham — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 01:29:17 GMT

In this post, we start to explore Umbraco development through the recently released WPF-based WebMatrix. A very well worded high-level overview of WebMatrix can be found on Nikhil Kothari’s blog: http://www.nikhilk.net/WebMatrix-Thoughts.aspx. Additionally, Scott Hanselman has just shared a blog article providing his insight on some use cases where WebMatrix can be of great value to ease and simplify development and deployment (http://www.hanselman.com/blog)

WebMatrix is installed through The Web Platform Installer 3.0 a “Portal” through which various tools (both Microsoft and non-Microsoft-based) can be installed (ex: Umbraco, WordPress, Visual Web Developer, etc.). I chose WebMatrix and initiated the install process. The application capitalized on the rich UI development capabilities of WPF to create a pleasant user-friendly experience from the time the tool is installed to project development and deployment.

Figure 1 - Install WebMatrix from The Web Plaform Installer 3.0

Figure 2 - Other available tools easily accessible through The Web Platform Installer 3.0

Figure 3 - Bringing a simple yet rich and fully-featured user interface.

Next, we put the "Portal" concept to the test as we used WebMatrix to download Umbraco. This was easily accessible by clicking on top leftmost blue drop down and choosing "Site From Web Gallery", then choosing Umbraco. We then proceeded to configure the Umbraco installation once download completed.

Figure 4 - Choose to Install Umbraco

Figure 4 - Umbraco download progress screen

Figure 5 - Umbraco download complete.

Figure 6 - Umbraco setup screen

On more worthy point to make is the quick out-of-the-box integration of WebMatrix with Visual Studio. Notice the Visual Studio Launch option on the next screenshot (left most menu option on menu bar).

Figure 7 - Visual Studio support in WebMatrix

This concludes our initial look at WebMatrix and its support for Umbraco download, configuration and development. I will be posting more as I continue to play with Umbraco within the WebMatrix environment.

--Sam Abraham