Umbraco 7 and Visual Studio 2013

Question

Ive got Umbraco 7 installed on my web server with the usual default skins and such and, what I want to do is create my own template(s) to use on the site ill be creating. Now Ive looked at all the documentation in Umbraco and all it really spends its time doing is talking about using an existing template code then adding CSS, Javascript and such. that's all well and good, but I want to use visual studio to develop this site/Application. the problem is that the Visual Studio template developed by Warren Buckley doesn't work on Visual Studio 2013 at all and there's no sign of him sorting this out it would seem...

What I want to do is develop the various templates I need, then add Bootstrap, develop custom menus, Forms for Credit card processing, emailing, etc (Not sure where you do this in Umbraco.. Macros perhaps?) then manage the content only in Umbraco. The developers of Umbraco don't seem to grasp the existence of Visual Studio or updating any documentation concerning Visual studio 2013 or Umbraco 7.

In short, All I bloody want to do is develop this Friggin thing in VS 2013, then manage content in Umbraco.. Umbraco is installed and running, VS 2013 sees the file content and can communicate with the web server perfectly..

Any help on this would be hot!!!!

Answer 1

You should consider using NuGet. Just create an empty project in Visual Studio, go to Nuget Package Manager Console and type

Install-Package UmbracoCms

Then it installs everything you need, and once it's done you run the application and it jumps straight into the setup. You can choose a custom setup where you choose DB options and starter kits and so forth.

And it definitely works in Visual Studio, I've done it plenty of times.

Answer 2

First off, I'd recommend buying one month of Umbraco TV and watching the Implementor and Developer track: http://umbraco.tv/

Generally, you can edit css, js, views, and partial views in Visual Studio. You will need to create Document Types in the back-office because they are in the database. That is, unless you want to use a code-first style package like Ditto: https://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/ditto .

Also, the Templates actually have a record in the database. So you must create them in the back-office if you need to connect them to DocumentTypes / Content. Or you could use code-first.