Andy Butland

I've recently returned from Codegarden , the annual Umbraco conference in Copenhagen. It was my second time there, and as previously had a great time and learnt a lot about the CMS and the various ways people are using it. There was a definite theme around many of the technical sessions, including the one I was asked to give, around the idea of strongly typed models and best practices and techniques for using them. Initially I was perhaps naively hoping that in these conversations with other developers tackling these issues, we'd might come to a consensus as to the best approach. Not surprisingly that didn't happen, and actually if anything the picture is changing further due to some interesting work on the core that Stephan presented. But that's no bad thing, options are good and it's clear that different developers and teams have different priorities in this area. Having mulled it all over a bit on the way home, seems to me we have (or soon will have) si...

I'm speaking at the Umbraco CodeGarden conference in Copenhagen this coming week, and for anyone interested in any of the background to the topics I discuss, here's a set of links to various resources. Firstly a copy of the slides . Mapping from Umbraco content to custom view models Umbraco Mapper package GitHub page , NuGet download and Our Umbraco package page . Dependency injection Blog post detailing setting up Ninject with Umbraco . Unit testing Blog posts on techniques for testing Umbraco surface controllers via external classes and Umbraco base classes . Blog post on use of MS Fakes and further details from MSDN