Hi..

I am trying to figure out the better way of working with Umbraco, and are quite new to Umbraco. I am in the process of re-writing a website and porting an old Umbraco version (4.7) based on User controls to the latest version with partial views, making the process a bit difficult as I have to both learn the old and new way of doing things.

I have made a backup of the existing production database, and attached this to a brand new Umbraco installation that has upgraded it. I am now in the painful process of rewriting all the templates and usercontrols, creating partial views and so on. I have worked locally on my own machine so far, but I have a need to publish the site to a development environment whilst control on the files.

For the «old» Umbraco web site there were no VS solution for the website. It just resided on a web server and was taken backup of, and code for usercontrols was kept in external libraries that was referenced in the web.config and in Umbraco, and updated whenever needed. I would like to use the Visual Studio solution that I set up for the site as a master to both edit and debug the SurfaceControllers, Views and other content and of course also have Source Control on all the code.

The challenge is of course when creating new templates and such in umbraco, the files is created on the server where umbraco is running. If this is done on the development/test server instead of my local development machine, i do not get the content into the visual studio solution and will have to add this manually.

Is there a good or recommended way of keeping things in sync between environments? (also considering production environment).

I have read a little about uSync and are wondering if this is the way to go.

I would love to hear how you have set up your development environment for Umbraco or if you have any recomendations, and also on how you deploy changes to the production environment.