At the moment, you can get a free instance of Windows on Amazon EC2 for free for a year using their Free Usage Tier. This means you can have a Windows server in the cloud with full remote desktop access, for free. So I decided it was high time I had a go at installing Umbraco in the cloud. Here are a couple of things you might find useful if you decide to try it for yourself.

It's easy to migrate your Umbraco 5 data from SQL CE to SQL Server 2008 using Microsoft's WebMatrix tool. I'll show you how.

The next meeting of the Glasgow Umbraco Users Group (GLUUG) is on Tuesday January 24th 2012 at 7pm in Blackfriars pub in Glasgow.

On Friday last (December 19^th) I took part in a virtual Umbraco hackathon. The idea was to create some tests for the Umbraco UI. Here are my thoughts after the day.

The inaugural meeting of the Glasgow Umbraco Users Group (GLUUG) was a great success.

I am preparing to give a talk on Umbraco v5 at the Umbraco Glasgow meetup on Monday December 5th. I want to try and get people excited about the new version by telling them about the best new bits. But what are the best bits?

I created a custom tree to take my products data from my custom hive provider (see my previous blog post). It simply reads the products from the provider and displays them in a custom tree in the Umbraco back-end. Use it as a starting point for building your own custom trees.

At the hackathon in London last week I decided to try and write a very simple custom Hive provider for Umbraco v5 Jupiter. I've now shared the code via the Umbraco 5 Contrib project and here is an overview of it.

Last week I attended the Umbraco UK Festival, as well as the Umbraco v5 hackathon in London. Here are my personal highlights from the trip.

I just gave uSiteBuilder a test-run and it really is a productivity boost for .NET developers working with Umbraco.