Wow what a conference!  Codegarden was 3 full days of sessions, hacking, collaboration and just all round fun.  We enjoyed Codegarden so much that we have decided to keep the special going!  Which means you are still able to get the Umbraco Level 1 & 2 Package at the special rate of NZD$3000 which is an overall NZD$700 saving. For more information and to register click here.

For those that didn't make it to Codegarden heres what it was all about.

Day 1 was the MVC Boot camp lead by Jon Galloway (Microsoft), Simone Chiaretta (ASP.NET MVP, ASPInsider and author of Beginning ASP.NET MVC on Wrox) and Steven Sanderson (Microsoft MVP, author of Pro ASP.NET MVC).  There were 2 streams.  A Beginner and an advanced stream.  I personally have not done all that much with MVC so decided to go on the beginner stream which was lead by Jon Galloway.  It was really great and I learnt a bunch.   I super excited to MVC in action in the next version of Umbraco (V5) which is in development already.

That evening the Umbraco HQ treated the conference attendees to an Midsummer party on the canals.  We floated our way around the Copenhagen canals taking in the atmosphere and watching the locals burn effigies of witches.  Was a great night had by all and thankfully no one fell in.

Days 2 and 3 followed on from the format of previous years.    This year started with a session presented by Alexander Kjerulf - Chief Happiness Officer on Happiness at work.  It was awesome as it got the crowd interacting and happy. View a short video here. (quality is low as it was shot on my iPhone.)

The keynote followed presented by Umbraco founder Niels Hartvig and Umbraco HQs Per Ploug Hansen and was full of news regarding the community, growth and the success of the previous year but most importantly were the two releases. One was the release of the our.umbraco.org update.  This is a significant upgrade to the community site bringing in many of the most requested features.  Our is the hub that connects the Umbraco development community and has proven to be one of the most important tools for developers.   The other release was version 4.5 which although a point release on the Umbraco framework is major in the fact that so much optimisation work and new features were added such as Examine, Linq2Umbraco, new tree, new datatypes, and an all-round system tune up.

The session for the rest of the day covered topics such as Search with Examine presented by Shannon Deminick from TheFARM Digital Sydney, crowd sourcing via Facebook put together by the guys from SkyBurd A/S, TDD with Umbraco presented by Aaron Powell from TheFARM Digital Sydney, I've downloaded Umbraco what now? presented by Bob Baty-barr, ARR & the Rave Engine which was a session run by Tommy Messbauer the lead developer of ASP.Net, Importing content presented by Richard Soeteman, Design Contour forms with Tim Geyssens of the Umbraco HQ to name the few that I managed to get to see part of.

That evening we played the always popular Umbraco Bingo. Ole Erling provided the accompaniment and the Umbracos did the Bingo calling.    It was strange evening with Umbracos pausing the proceedings to say "Bring in the Horns!" as a Danish Horn band marched through the venue and out the door again.  Weird but in the spirit of the evening was awesome.  Prizes presented included a Umbraco door mat, an Umbraco biker vest delivered by a biker, and the grand prize was a  framed canvas of the core team.
Photo: Douglas Robar

Day 3 was the open space sessions.  This was a time for all conference attendees to get involved and give them an opportunity to contribute.  Sessions ran all day on all sorts of subjects including Training & Certification, the Umbraco Core Values, the Hackathon where they built a new datatype from scratch, Snapshot which is a upcoming project by TheFARM Digital allowing the export of a fully working databaseless ASP.Net site. (more info on www.farmcode.org) and much more.

Photo: Douglas Robar

Day 3 ended with the package and skin contests.  The winning package was the datatype built by Shannon Deminick during the Hackathon and the winning skin was a tribute to GeoCities built by Warren Buckley.

Codegarden is a key event on the Umbraco calendar.  I look forward to attending again next year and encourage those from Australasia that if you can make it you should.

To celebrate the upcoming Umbraco Codegarden conference, Little Web Empire Ltd are offering a further $200 discount for any level 1 & 2 combo training seats for August purchased before Codegarden ends (25th of June 2010).   Thats a massive NZD$700 saving! To take advantage of this you need to signup before midnight on the 25th of June 2010. Spaces are limited. Click here for more information or to register.

What is Codegarden?  Codegarden is the annual Umbraco conference held in Copenhagen, Denmark.  This year's line up is phenomenal and better than ever with 30+ sessions across 3 days all relating to Umbraco. If you are considering going It's not too late but tickets are selling fast.  For information on Codegarden see http://codegarden10.com

Announcing Umbraco Level 1 & 2 Certification will be running in Sydney on the 3rd - 6th of August and then in Melbourne from the 9th - 12th Aug.

These coures have been highly popular and even more so since we started offering the Level 2 course earlier this year. These are the official courses that are taught in Europe by Niels Hartvig.   To see what some of the past attendees have said about these course go to the training page.

The level 1 course is is aimed at developers/html developers who are new to Umbraco or to those developers who want to formalise their knowledge in the form of certification. For full details of what is covered go to the training page.

Level 2 is all about extending Umbraco.  This course assumes that the developer has been using Umbraco for a while and familiar with the Umbraco concepts.   If you are new to Umbraco and are looking at taking the Level 2 only, we would suggest that you also take the Level 1 course also to get up to speed with the foundations of the system. For more infomation on Level 2 go to the Level 2 training page.

If you are serious about Umbraco and want to get the most out of the system we suggest taking both couses togehter. A package rate applies saving a considerable amount if you choose this option.

Spaces for this course are limited so get in early and reserve your space.  click here to register for level 1 now or click here to register for level 2 now or here to register for level 1 & 2.

 

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Check out this years Umbraco Christmas Calendar at http://www.umbraco.org

 

I recently was talking with some friends all of whom were iPhone users.  Someone asked me "Can you build an iPhone app?"  After a little thought I said "I don't see why not".

Now to give you some background I am a web developer, and have primarily been focused on building websites using the Umbraco CMS.   The language that I use everyday is C# and I work on a PC.  This was the first issue, and straight away I could see that this was going to be somewhat of an expensive mission as iPhone apps can only be compiled and deployed on Apple gear.  I'm probably going to get someone tell me that I am wrong about this and that you can build iPhone apps on a PC but I wanted to do this the correct way.

Thankfully I was in the market for a new personal home machine as our equipment at home was beginning to get a little tired.  I settled on a MacBook Pro 15" 2.8 with 500GB HD and 4GB of ram.  It was a good balance of power for dollars especially since apple had dropped the price on their equipment significantly in the past couple of weeks.  The MacBook arrived and I went about downloading the iPhone SDK from the apple developers site.  You can get this for free but they suggest that you sign up to the iPhone Developers Program as this will give you access to more help and a clear deployment pathway at a cost of $99USD.  I haven't done this step yet as I still have a few things to sort out.

Ok… according to Apple I have everything that I need to build an App.  Problem.   I don't know Objective-C which iPhone apps are written in.  Solution, MonoTouch.  This is a project developed by Novell and runs on the MonoDevelop environment.   MonoTouch is an iPhone SDK for C# developers.  Perfect, but it has a price tag of $399USD.  I've decided that this is the price I have to pay as I don't really have the time to learn a new language, and I want to get up and running as quick as I possibly can so I will be shelling out for this shortly.

Anyway this is currently where I am up to.  I have a number of different ideas for what I can deploy as my first app and one of those that I think will be useful I will blog about next time when I will talk through the design process and how I am going about planning this thing.  Hint.  Its going to have something to do with Umbraco :)

Not many Umbraco users or developers know about this feature even though they have used it in their pitch material and have sold it to clients as a feature.

Umbraco has the ability to interface with Microsoft Word or liveWriter via a set of popular blogging APIs.  This is a feature that we teach developers how to use on the Level 1 Umbraco training course.  It allows you the ability to hookup 3 fields (Description, Category, Excerpt) to Umbraco fields.  For example you could manage your News, Blog, or any other simple repeated content.

Check out Content Channels in the Users section of the back office sometime and try hook it up yourself.

BTW this post was posted from liveWriter :)

Over the past few months we have been super busy at Little Web Empire and thought that it was high time that we told people what we have been up to.

Firstly the Umbraco Worldwide Training week back in October was a major success with courses being run around the world in five cities (Copenhagen, London, Seattle, Auckland and Sydney).  Little Web Empire held the courses in both Auckland and Sydney seeing many new developers added to the Umbraco Certified Professionals list.  We also saw Terabyte Interactive (Auckland) and Next Digital (Melbourne) attain Umbraco Solutions Provider status.

Site releases.

Around the busy training schedule we also released three new Umbraco based sites.

Collective Edition www.collectiveedition.com

Nuts About New Zealand www.nutsaboutnz.co.nz

Minti Clothing Store store.iloveminti.com

What's coming up?

We are busy finalising the details for the next round of Umbraco training in Australia and should be able to announce something regarding this shortly.  The interest in the courses has been massive.  We look forward to being able to provide a complete schedule for 2010 sometime soon and

I thought that I should put a post up on the site around ie6 compatibility and my blog.

When I first developed the site I said "I'm not going to care about ie6".   That's all well and good but I am one of those developers that out of curiosity goes and loads the site up in ie6 to see what it looks like.   All I can say is "FAIL".

In New Zealand where I live probably 25% of the corporate market is still using ie6 and so far around 10% of my visitors are getting the "ie6 FAIL" experience.

With this in mind I have decided that I am going to commit a small amount of time to try and reign in some of the major issues with ie6.  I'm not promising that it will look the same as in the modern browsers but at least fix some of the major layout issues.

I wrote this a few weeks back for an email that went out to the Asia Pac Umbraco newsletter subscribers about the benefits of becoming an Umbraco Certified Professional but I thought that I would share it here also.

This is what I wrote:

"There are many benefits for both the developer and their employer when becoming fully Umbraco Certified Professionals.  With Umbraco fast becoming one of the leading open source .net CMS worldwide, being an Umbraco certified developer is a great barter card for any developer when seeking work, both as an employee or as a contractor. For the employer and certainly their sales team, being able to tell clients the team are certified gives both credibility and assurance.  If four or more employees within an organisation are certified, they then become an Umbraco Certified Solutions Provider, gaining a profile on the Umbraco website and exposure to many of potential customers."

I became an Umbraco Certified Professional approximately 2.5 years ago in Melbourne Australia when Niels Hartvig came and ran a Level 2 course.  The course was a complete sell out with people travelling from as far away as China to attend. At that stage the only way you could gain certification was to travel to Denmark, so when the opportunity arose anyone who was using Umbraco seriously jumped at it.

Since then I have been full time developing with Umbraco.  Certification gave me a kick start into knowing the system well and having the confidence to attack projects.  At that stage in my career I was also heavily involved in the sales process.  Certification was something that the larger corporate clients appreciated.  It gave them both the confidence that they were using someone who knew what they were doing, and also that they were buying into a system that had a community of developers prepared to invest in a product through a certification program.

Umbraco has grown exponentially (in terms of installs) since then and is now the top download from the Microsoft Web Platform installer in the CMS category. Clients are now aware of Umbraco and now more than ever are looking for Umbraco Certified Professionals and Certified Solutions Providers to help them through the development process.

I now offer training for developers, leading them through the Level 1 training course and equipping them with the knowledge they need to pass their Level 1 Certification test on completion.

I fully encourage anyone interested in getting their certification to do it. If you are interested in becoming an Umbraco Certified Professional check out the training page for more details.

I've been running Windows 7 for approximately 2 weeks now.  I really like it.  But one thing that i did notice is that when debugging out of Visual Studio (F5) and using Firefox as the browser that it was very slow to serve.  Mind numbingly slow.

Murray Roke put me onto this article that explains that IPV6 support in Firefox effects the speed of connection to Cassini for some reason. Turning off IPV6 support in Firefox is easy.

• In the address bar type 'about:config'
• Filter by 'v6'
• Disable ipv6 support.

Hope that tidbit helps.