Is there an easy way to work with my companywide dlls inside Umbraco? I could write a CMS for our company, but would rather save time and leverage one already written. I need to be able to leverage a lot of libraries I have already created for our company and just snap those into pages.
Definitely. I'm more familiar with Umbraco v4 but I'm sure this is possible in v5 as well. I've been writing ASP.Net MVC applications for over 2 years.
If you place your company dlls into the bin folder of an Umbraco site, they will be available to any .Net usercontrols or classes you write for Umbraco. Effectively you would use your company dlls as your business and if necessary, your data layer and use Umbraco and any custom usercontrols you create for the presentation layer.
So thinking along the lines of an Umbraco v4 solution... I would create a new ASP.Net Web Application project in Visual Studio and then you need to remove most of the folders and aspx pages and create some folders such as css, code, plugins etc. Inside this project you will create any custom classes, usercontrols, web form pages, javascript or css that you need and you would add references to any company dlls that your custom classes/usercontrols need. Finally you add a post-build event to xcopy the files from this project into your Umbaco website every time you build the project.
Using that set-up you can cleanly seperate and source control (e.g. using SVN) your own project, with all its custom code, from the standard Umbraco website, while also still being able to debug the code using breakpoints etc. in Visual Studio. The Umbraco videos go through this step-by-step and are well worth subscribing to if you want to learn more about v4, but there's not anything in there for v5 yet - http://umbraco.com/help-and-support/video-tutorials.aspx. Check out the videos "Using .Net Controls" and "Debugging" in the section "Introduction to Umbraco".
If you're trying to achieve something quite simple, you may not need to create a seperate project and you could simply copy your dlls to the Umbraco site and reference them in your Razor scripts in the Umbraco back office. I haven't done this, but I'm sure it's possible.
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Is there an easy way to work with my companywide dlls inside Umbraco? I could write a CMS for our company, but would rather save time and leverage one already written. I need to be able to leverage a lot of libraries I have already created for our company and just snap those into pages.
Hi Mike,
Definitely. I'm more familiar with Umbraco v4 but I'm sure this is possible in v5 as well. I've been writing ASP.Net MVC applications for over 2 years.
If you place your company dlls into the bin folder of an Umbraco site, they will be available to any .Net usercontrols or classes you write for Umbraco. Effectively you would use your company dlls as your business and if necessary, your data layer and use Umbraco and any custom usercontrols you create for the presentation layer.
So thinking along the lines of an Umbraco v4 solution... I would create a new ASP.Net Web Application project in Visual Studio and then you need to remove most of the folders and aspx pages and create some folders such as css, code, plugins etc. Inside this project you will create any custom classes, usercontrols, web form pages, javascript or css that you need and you would add references to any company dlls that your custom classes/usercontrols need. Finally you add a post-build event to xcopy the files from this project into your Umbaco website every time you build the project.
Using that set-up you can cleanly seperate and source control (e.g. using SVN) your own project, with all its custom code, from the standard Umbraco website, while also still being able to debug the code using breakpoints etc. in Visual Studio. The Umbraco videos go through this step-by-step and are well worth subscribing to if you want to learn more about v4, but there's not anything in there for v5 yet - http://umbraco.com/help-and-support/video-tutorials.aspx. Check out the videos "Using .Net Controls" and "Debugging" in the section "Introduction to Umbraco".
If you're trying to achieve something quite simple, you may not need to create a seperate project and you could simply copy your dlls to the Umbraco site and reference them in your Razor scripts in the Umbraco back office. I haven't done this, but I'm sure it's possible.
That sounds just like what I need. I will play around with this today and see if I can get it working. Thanks a lot for the help.
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