Using Visual Studio with Bootstrap and Umbraco

Question

I need some assistance setting up a solution in Visual Studio which uses Umbraco.

I'm planning on developing with the Umbraco CMS platform in Visual Studio 2013, using C# and Bootstrap. Source control will be done with Team Foundation Server.

I understand that I need to create an empty ASP.NET MVC Application, then create a C# Class, then use NuGet to install Umbraco on my development server. Do I need to do anything else to set up my environment?

And where exactly does Bootstrap fit into this?

Answer 1

First of all - Umbraco it is a Content Management System. It provides you an a back-office for managing content of your system.

Umbraco also have a project template which you can download inside visual studio. This project contains all needed structure and packages in it.

Here are couple of useful links:

Umbraco Template Project

Article called NuGet Packages and Visual Studio Templates

So now, when you have Umbraco installed and you have your back-office - you need to display your content somehow for end users. Here is a place where you can use Bootstrap to apply styling for your content.

Answer 2

I just started testing Umbraco recently. I installed using the Web Platform Installer which setup Umbraco using WebMatrix. From there, WebMatrix has an option to open the web app in a Visual Studio solution.

Most of the time I still use the Umbraco back end to edit templates and partial views/macros, but for more complicated ones I use the VS solution to edit the cshtml files directly. The added value of Intellisense is quite helpful, plus you can attach to IIS Express and debug the macros.

As for Bootstrap, I've referenced all necessary files in a master template from which all other templates inherit. Initially I used the free Umbraco Bootstrap template from Bind Tuning, but didn't see how it was any better than just installing the bootstrap files manually, or even referencing the CDN.

I did try the NuGet package, and if memory serves, there is an issue with source files not available if you choose the local db option (which I did since I was just evaluating Umbraco).