Installing Umbraco with Visual Studio – Update

Just over a year ago I blogged about the problems I was having installing Umbraco via Visual Studio. At the time, I couldn’t get Visual Studio 2013 to install correctly, and Visual Studio 2012 only worked correctly when Resharper was turned off. I created quite a few sites in this manner. The original problem was that something was screwing up and preventing Visual Studio from understanding it was a MVC project so the scaffolding options on the menus were missing.

Since then, I have used VS2013 and also 2015 to some extent. I am pleased to report that the latest version of Umbraco installs correctly and is somewhat simpler (I still disable ReSharper and avoid IE though for the install itself).

In summary, the steps are:

1. Start Visual Studio
2. Ensure ReSharper Disabled
3. Create a new empty web application with the MVC references
4. Install Umbraco via the nuget package using “Manage Nuget Packages for Solution”
5. Ensure IE is not the default browser
6. Create an empty SQL database on your dev machine
7. Run the Visual Studio project
8. Choose Custom Install and specify the correct database settings. I normally use a SQL server user for each database on my dev machine, so this will need setting up beforehand.
9. Don’t forget your admin username and password because its more difficult to reset with later versions of Umbraco (I’ll blog about this the next time I have to do it because it can be done).

When I was doing the latest install on Visual Studio 2015, I found this post interesting (although I don’t use Visual Studio Online): http://maffrigby.com/how-to-deploy-umbraco-7-to-an-azure-website-using-visual-studio-online/

Publishing

The basic procedure is:

1. Set up your usual publish settings
2. Ensure media folder is included in the project along with other files (not App_Data/cache)
3. Ensure App_Data/umbraco.config is not included in the publish as this is a cache file for the content.
4. Execute the Publish

When publishing to Windows Azure, if any transform errors appear with web.config, or web.config files not found, then change the web.config Build Action to “None”. This is likely to apply not to the main web.config, but some of the others in the solution such as the one in Umbraco/xslt.

About Phil

I have been working as a software developer since 1983. This blog could have been called "From Fortran 77, C and Cobol to C# in 20 (not so) easy years", but it doesn't sound quite right somehow. Besides I'm talking about what's happened since 2003, not before!