My boss wants me to develop our Umbraco 7.1 user controls (MVC based) using the "Umbraco Core Binaries" NuGet package.  He says it will help us better see what pieces are ours versus what is Umbraco.  And it will prevent us from having to check all of Umbraco into source control.

I do have a working full install of Umbraco on my machine.  My intent is to point the configuration of this test site at the same database.

However, to make this feasible we need a test bed for our user controls in this solution.  That is where I am having trouble.  I created a simple "Hello, World!" home page with static text and a basically empty controller.  That page gives the error:

Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: umbracoContext

Is it possible to create a testbed into which I can simply drop a user control?  I am not sure how I would log in.

A better question, is this worthwhile?  I have the feeling it would be MUCH easier to simply use the full Umbraco Nuget package and then just package up our components using the built in Umbraco packaging when we want to push to our test servers.  I guess we would have to do that packaging from our Build server though, which would be a bit odd.

Thanks,

Vance