Setting up Umbraco in Visual Studio
15/02/2011 1 Comment
In the time I’ve worked with Umbraco I’ve seen two types of project setups (in Visual Studio) – one simply places the project on top of the actual Umbraco installation, and then excludes some folders, where as the other uses Visual Studio build events to copy your project output into a separate “clean” version of Umbraco.
This link describes the latter “copy-over” approach: http://our.umbraco.org/wiki/how-tos/getting-started-with-umbraco-what-is-next-after-you-install/setting-up-your-project-in-visual-studio and this link (amongst other things) describes the first mentioned “in-place” approach: http://www.aaron-powell.com/how-i-developer-umbraco.
On balance I prefer the “in-place” approach. The “copy-over” is nice, in that it keeps your project small, and allows you to keep the Umbraco solution completely out of Visual Studio. However, as you project grows the build time will increase either way, and what will really (really) get your goat, is the time it takes to even make little CSS or HTML changes. You make these and you have to do a full build, which will copy over all configs, binaries etc – which will in turn trigger the app pool to recycle and on a large project, you can easily end up waiting more than 30 secs for even the smallest updates.
I’ve worked around this before by configuring different build configurations in visual studio and then only copying say HTML, js and CSS for the “Frontend” build – but it still gets slow.
The “in-place” approach seems messy to start with, but actually it works very well. Once you exclude your items from Visual Studio it’s much like working with the “copy-over” solution, but you have much faster build times.
Happy Umbraco’ing whatever you go with!