Umbraco UK Festival 2010

Last Friday (15th October) I attended the Umbraco UK Festival 2010. The event was held at De Morgan House in London and attracted about 80 enthusiasts & contributors (mainly ASP.NET Framework developers) of the project, and was the first of this type and scale within the UK.

For those wondering what Umbraco is – it’s a popular free open-source web CMS (Content Management System) built on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Developed by Niels Hartvig in 2002 (based on ASP & COM objects), it all dates back to 1997 when he finished a high school in Denmark and then released the first version called “The Administrative Tool”. It was this version that started what finally became known as Umbraco (based on ASP.NET Web Forms), later released as open source in 2004. In 2009, CMS Wire described Umbraco as one of the leading .NET-based open source CMS systems. This year, with 1000 downloads a day, Umbraco featured among the top five most popular downloads via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It allows you to leverage your skills and investments on ASP.NET MVC, Internet Information Services (IIS), and SQL Server.

The festival consisted of several sessions with speakers including Niels Hartvig (Founder of Umbraco Project), Alex Norcliffe (Lead Architect for Umbraco 5) and Martin Beeby (Developer Evangelist at Microsoft specialising in the Web and IE9). Indeed – it was an amazing event! :-)

The first session (“Where did we come from and where are we heading”) was delivered by Neils Hartvig and he talked about the past, the present, and the future of the Umbraco project. He also emphasised the importance of a relationship with Microsoft, which provides the Core Team with access to the various teams and coming technologies. The final part of the session formed a demonstration of “Prodigy” (due to become available in November) – a Windows Phone 7 application that allows for managing the content of an Umbraco website whilst on the move. Ultimately, Neils Hartvig described all the achievements on the Umbraco project to date as “Sustainable Idealism”.

The second session (“Umbraco 5 - The Story So Far”) was delivered by Alex Norcliffe and he concentrated on the technical side of Umbraco 5 development including the rationale, version 5 goals, tracks of development, as well as future incorporation of MVC (Model View Controller) 3 & Razor View Engine (replacing the current ASP.NET Web Forms).

The final session (“A man. A phone. And a browser”) was delivered by Martin Beeby and offered a unique introduction to the world of innovation: Internet Explorer 9 Beta (i.e. hardware acceleration), HTML5 (i.e. canvas tag) and Windows Phone 7 (i.e. application development & user experience) – all covered in a combination of engaging slides, practical examples & live demos. The audience absolutely loved it! :-)

Finally – I managed to conduct an interview with Niels Hartvig about all things Umbraco, his journey into programming, and what he thinks about Microsoft Platform & .NET Framework innovations.

Rafal Kwiek (RK): I’ve heard that this is the first time an Umbraco Festival has been held in the UK?Niels Hartvig (NH): The London (February 2010) Birthday Event was the biggest event we’ve hosted so far (as usual, organised by The CogWorks Team and Warren Buckley). We rented a boat (on the Thames) and there were about a hundred people attending the day-long event. We also held Codegarden in Denmark where there was just a great atmosphere with a lot of British people. That’s when it struck us “hey why not call it rather a festival”. Initially it was just a joke but on the final day of Codegarden I said “I don’t think this is a conference, I think this is more of a festival” because the event was going on all day and all evening. RK: And how many people are attending today’s event?NH: There are about 80 people attending and there are another 20 on the waiting list. RK: You mentioned in your presentation that as soon as you finished high school you started creating the foundation for Umbraco. How did you get interested in the .NET Platform? Why didn’t you try to create Umbraco in PHP & MySQL…?NH: The company where I worked used ASP.NET (C#) – so that was what we used. At that point it wasn’t as popular to try all the different platforms and PHP wasn’t as accessible as it is today. RK: So you have no regrets…? :-)NH: Not at all! ASP.NET is a really good platform… :-) RK: How long have you been programming?NH: I started programming at the tender age of 8. I had a COMMODORE 64, with 3 games - we couldn’t afford more games, but there were some really incredible games like a supa game and table tennis. And then my sister got a book out of the library on  programming and I just typed in whatever it showed me as I didn’t understand anything… so I just caught on and I think when I was about 10 I started understanding what I was doing. RK: So how did you have the idea about creating something like Umbraco?NH: I worked for a company called Snabel & Co about a year before I was supposed to start studying – we had lots of fun messing around doing web development and we developed the CMS. Then I got really tired of doing web development and went to a company who made 3D games for LEGO, using Director. After you’ve worked with Director for 6 months I would do anything to stop writing things in Director, so eventually I started freelancing. Although I insisted I wasn’t building a CMS, it turned out actually I was, and that’s how it all started. RK: You released the first version of Umbraco in 2002/3 and you only employed the first person in 2008 – did you work on your own on Umbraco for the first 5 years? NH: Yes, but at the same time I wasn’t building Umbraco alone. In 2004 two guys came along to help me (also freelancers) and then the community started growing. People started contributing… RK: From your point of view, the .NET framework is the best platform for developing and scaling Umbraco. Are you planning to incorporate any of ASP.NET’s latest features like MVC 3?NH: Well it was probably 18 months ago that the core team decided to move to MVC (from Web Forms, which is what we have now) so we can expect that early next year we will have the new version 5 which is 100% MVC. The way MVC has been developed and its whole approach, the team – everything – it felt like the right thing to do, it’s the perfect fit for the Umbraco team. RK: You all tend to use Visual Studio for development. Do you think its lightweight version, WebMatrix, could be a good starting point for students who want to customise Umbraco?NH: I talked today about the fact that a holistic approach is central to the Umbraco vision – how the community, the core product and the company itself works together to simplify everything, so you install a module with one click, for example. WebMatrix is like the missing piece in the puzzle – you have Web Platform Installer where you can go and grab a web product, and sometimes you can write code in an editor, but in many cases you need to write some .NET code and you need a tool to do that. WebMatrix is brilliant in that it’s not an attempt to be a scaled down version of Visual Studio, it’s just a tool that’s optimised to build solutions on top of existing web apps. WebMatrix is a product we’re going to devote a lot of time to in enabling Umbraco to work well with it, because that means anyone interested in web development gets the perfect start!