On November 28th Jon and I had our second day of development work on SocialFront for Umbraco. A little overdue but here are our notes from the day.

Day one developing a social networking package called SocialFront for Umbraco. Lots of mistakes were made, tea was drunk, fun was had - and progress was made. Read all about it!

I've just spent a full day working with Jon Carlos on a new open-source social networking platform called SocialFront for Umbraco. It's nowhere near ready for release yet, but I thought I'd introduce the project by talking about the philosophy behind the project and the hopes that we have for its future.

I had a couple of problems on the new Web Garden Umbraco v4.0.1 with Windows Live Writer 2009 integration. In this blog post I describe the issues that I had and the solution to those issues.

At last I have gotten around to upgrading the Web Garden site to the latest version of Umbraco. Here are the details of some of the packages that I installed, including site compression, image caching, google sitemap, new blog package for Umbraco v4 and some other features that may be of interest.

I previously blogged about a simple Umbraco helper class to get Umbraco data into your usercontrols, but since then I've updated it quite a bit. Due to ongoing efforts to package up my code into more easily re-usable chunks, I've created a new class library, WebGarden.Utilities, that I just add to each new project. It gives me access to a number of handy functions, a few of which I'm going to share here (the more general purpose ones).

I usually use an Umbraco Helper class with my user controls to encapsulate any business logic that interacts with Umbraco. Here are a couple of very basic, general purpose methods which you can use to start easily pulling Umbraco data into your user controls.

Last week Web Garden went to Copenhagen again to attend the Level 2 Umbraco training course to become an Umbraco Certified Professional. Here are some of the gems that came up over the two days.

Sometimes you want to have a normal .aspx page in your Umbraco site that you would like to function as a normal page (i.e. doesn't get served by Umbraco). If you do, don't forget to update your umbracoReservedUrls setting in the web.config.

I have been using visual studio 2008 for a while now, and I just found out how to turn on XSLT autocomplete! This is very handy for any XSLT development, but especially nice for Umbraco developers.