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.

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.

 

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 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.

Last night while I was frantically getting the training registration system running I ran into an issue that I had never come across before.  This website has a simple shopping cart that relies on session state variables to maintain the cart content.

All was working fine in the development environment (VS2008 Casinni, Windows 7 IIS7) and I was happy with how it was working.  So I decided to deploy to my live server.  All looked good until I tired to view the cart. BAM!!!  big YSOD.

Session state can only be used when enableSessionState is set to true,
either in a configuration file or in the Page directive. Please also
make sure that System.Web.SessionStateModule or a custom session state
module is included in the <configuration>\<system.web>\<httpModules>
section in the application configuration.

I went and checked the web config and everything looked in order.  I had the necessary attributes on the <pages> tag of enableSessionState="true" etc but still no luck.   After trawling the internet for about 2 hours and trying many different suggestions my web.config was starting to look nasty and then I stumbled across an old blog entry on the Umbraco site that discussed migrating to ASP.NET 3.5 and II7

Apparently my issue is to do with extensionless URLs and IIS 7.  For some reason with extensionless URLs the Session State does not get initialized.  To ensure that the Session State is initialized everytime you need to add runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True" to the modules tag in the system.webServer section of the web.config II7.  it should look like this.

<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="True">

And voila!  Session State works again.

We received a lot of interest from Australia and are pleased to confirm that we will be running Level 1 training in Sydney Australia on the 22nd and 23rd of October.

The venue is still to be confirmed but that should be sorted by the end of the week.

For more information and registration please visit the training page.

I'm looking forward to meeting all my fellow Umbracoians in Australia.

Announcing Umbraco Level 1 Certification will be running in Auckland on the 19th & 20th of October 2009.

Finally we are able to offer the same Level 1 course as taught by Niels Hartvig (Umbraco Founder) to Australasian Umbraco Developers who wish to become Certified Umbraco Professionals.

This course 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.

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

We will also be running a course in Sydney Australia but I'm still firming up the details for this.  On that note If you have space in Sydney and are interested in hosting the training session please contact me at peter@littlewebempire.com

Update:  I can now confirm Sydney Australia for October 22nd and 23rd.  Check out the blog post.