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Working in Visual Studio when developing umbraco solutions (2nd Way)

    Hi,

    I understand the very first approach has been discussed in Open Space Session. I haven't attended but still wish to add my way of using Umbraco with Visual Studio 2010. By this approach, I get everything in one sweet place and I can easily debug my application by Debug->Attach to process option.

    I won't be talking about multi-developer environment and steps as that are provided in our first approach.

    Steps

    1. Unzip Latest Umbraco package and point IIS website to that folder (It is still advisable to user IIS Admin pro for XP users). Follow the installation step and make it up and running.

    2. I would suggest installing Runway or web-site package by Warren Buckley.

    3. Create a Web-Application using Visual Studio 2010 or later version. By default you will get folder and files given by Web-Application say web.config and bin folder. Now close your web-application / project in VS2010

    4. Now go to your Umbraco website root folder, select all files and folders and copy / paste it to the root folder of your Visual Studio 2010 web-application. Process will ask do you want to overwrite. Click yes / all

    5. Once you copy all the files and folder of your Umbraco web-site to VS2010 web-application root directory. Go to IIS and now point your website folder to the new location that we have, ie your VS2010 web-project root directory.

    6. While Umbraco installation as per instructions, we have to give NETWORK SERVICE rights to the website, we need to do the same here. Add NETWORK SERVICE rights to the VS2010 web-application root folder. Later make sure your website is running fine, do check by logging-in admin mode as well.

    7. Finally open the Web-Application project in VS2010, and in "Solution Explorer", locate second icon that says "Show All files". On click, all the files that exist in web-application project and not included will be shown to you.

    8. Include the following list of folders to Web-Application project, 

    ·         App_Browsers

    ·         app_code

    ·         bin

    ·         config

    ·         css

    ·         data

    ·         masterpages

    ·         media

    ·         scripts

    ·         Umbraco

    ·         umbraco_client

    ·         usercontrols

    ·         xslt.

    Note: (Umbraco and umbraco_client folders might take longer time while you include)

    In the Umbraco, default.aspx is not linked with default.aspx.cs and designer files. (You can link it, if required. your call!).

    Note: Worth mentioning, when you include data folder in VS2010, it might have some folders that are named by GUIDs. I would suggest you to exclude those folders. I have experienced ambiguity compilation errors on user controls. But after excluding those GUID named folders from my project, it successfully compiled.

    Oh yes, do not forget to reference cms, businesslogic and umbraco assemblies to VS web-application.

    For working in team, copy the installed version to all development machines and have a centralized database(Probably this is a good practice rather going for db on each dev machine).

    And then you are good to go with your development ;) 

    I have successfully added this project in SVN-subversion and TFS and able to maintain without any issues.

    Release build for same project was given further by using Publish feature from VS2010.

    All good!! 

    Umbraco remains my favorite CMS ;)

     

    Cheers,

    Ranjit J. Vaity