In the past while, I've noticed a distinct shift amongst .NET
developers working with Umbraco towards working with strongly types
objects and away from XSLT. While XSLT is perfect for manipulating
XML (that being what it is designed for), and the Umbraco site data
is cached on the server as an XML file, it's just not as satisfying
as working with strongly typed objects. It's much easier to
implement a robust testing framework when you're working with
strongly typed objects. Also, a lot of developers just don't like
XSLT. The last agency I worked with used only .NET macros with
strongly typed objects - no XSLT at all.
Enter uSiteBuilder. This is an open-source product that allows
you to create your document types, templates, and member types in a
.NET solution and have them magically appear within Umbraco. This
saves you using the Umbraco admin whatsoever and keeps you where
you're comfortable, i.e. in the Visual Studio environment. I'm not
going to go into this in much detail here as the tutorials on the
uSiteBuilder site are great, and Sebastiaan has already created
an
excellent and detailed post on the topic.
For me the benefits are obvious. If you're an Umbraco developer
who is creating Umbraco sites week-in, week-out then you'll already
have your standard master document type, etc, that you create on
every new site. Now these can exist in code and simply by dropping
your compiled dll along with the uSiteBuilder dll on to the server
your basic settings are done in a flash. It simplifies making
changes - you just update your document type classes, for example,
rebuild and deploy, and you're done. No more adding/updating
through the Umbraco admin interface. It allows you to work with
strongly typed objects in your code, and even provides helper
functions to do the most common tasks for you. It simplifies
deploying changes to the server, as instead of re-doing your
changes through the Umbraco admin on your live site (which is
error-prone, not to mention tedious), you simply drop your dlls
into the bin directory and your changes are made. It's also quick
and easy to get up and running.
I highly recommend you give it a try. (I'm looking at you, @yodasmydad).
