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 (in no particular order):

XSLT is dead - long live Razor!

XSLT support is being dropped from Umbraco Jupiter, the next version of Umbraco which is due out before the end of this year. As Niels said on twitter:

Check out the Razor tutorials here - I have to say, they are great. Of course, this makes my blog post on uSiteBuilder all the more relevant!

Examine as a provider for version 5

Because you can stack providers with the new Umbraco data layer known as Hive, and because there is a Hive provider for Examine already, you can quickly drop in this provider for lightning-fast caching on your site, more or less for free. There was also a mention of a default caching provider which will be added to Hive and sit above nHibernate for caching as well.

uComponents is awesome!

Lee Kelleher's talk on uComponents was excellent - it turns out there's more to uComponents than the multinode tree picker! It's definitely worth having a more in-depth look, and hopefully his talk will be available online soon so he can take you through it.

KnockoutJS is awesome!

I'd had a look at Steve Sanderson's talk on KnockoutJS last week after Shannon had mentioned it in one of his talks at Codegarden 11. It's an excellent talk and really inspired me to use KnockoutJS as soon as I have the chance! It turns out the Umbraco core team are also fans, and they are using it for the Umbraco back-end. Matt Brailsford's talk on it was interesting and entertaining. He spoke about the ko.mapping plugin for converting your c# objects into jQuery model objects.

Umbraco Jupiter (v5) is awesome!

I was lucky enough to get a place at the hackathon the day before the festival, and I got stuck into creating a new Hive provider just to see how it all hangs together. By the end of the day I had a read-only provider pulling data into Hive from a SQL Server database. With Alex Norcliffe's help, Maciej Golis managed to then create a property editor which displayed this data in a dropdown list. It was great to watch these two guys in action - I need to seriously up my game!

The community is awesome!

It was great to meet everyone over the two days (too many to list here!), I learned a lot about Umbraco, v5, general coding, as well as gleaning some good tips from fellow freelancers working in my area. All in all time well spent. Thanks once again to all the guys at Cogworks who organised such a great day, and I look forward to seeing everyone again at CodeGarden 12!