CodeGarden 2015

So with CodeGarden 2015 over and everyone beginning to get CodeGarden blues I thought I’d take a look back at the infamous Umbraco developer festival. As always the conference was jam-packed full of inspiring talks, great ideas and an awesome community.

As well as the keynote with Niels I saw presentations by, among others, James South and Shannon Deminick.

WebAPI 2

The announcement that Web API 2 will be incorporated into Umbraco at the keynote provoked excitement around the conference hall where the core team explained how the REST API for Content, Media, Members, and Relations using HAL format for discoverability and compatibility.

HAL is a simple format that gives a consistent and easy way to hyperlink between resources in your API. (Find more information about HAL, as well as a demo of the HAL API).

All your images are belong to Umbraco

With websites growing everyday, making images more efficient is becoming hugely important. James South’s talk on images inside Umbraco exposed the reality of what were doing to the web. James talked about how we can improve the performance of our websites through the medium of ImageProcessor which is part of the Umbraco core. He also gave a great demo of how you can tap into ImageProcessor in order to set a maximum size for all images across the site, so when an editor uploads an image onto the site, ImageProcessor steps in and sets a maximum size, in turn reducing the weight of the page and improving the performance of the site.

Load Balancing on Umbraco

Shannon gave an inspiring talk on Load Balancing which was hugely popular with the Umbraco community and certainly gave us inspiration to see where can use Load Balancing in a couple of our projects. Shannon spoke about how the Umbraco Core Team have updated support for load-balanced environments that allows for much more flexibility and reliability. This includes support for multiple instances on Azure App Services.

Shannon also gave a demo of Autoscaling Umbraco on Azure. It’s fair to say that his demo featured lots of dark magic, that I’m not sure I entirely followed. But it was an awesome demo of some really useful tech that I’m keen to research in more depth.

Although load balancing is by no means easy, this has given me motivation to implement it on at least one of our existing projects and with the new and improved documentation on Our, this is definitely on my to do list.

Umbraco.com

With deployments and environments becoming a hot topic at CodeGarden 2015, it seems as if the availability of Umbraco.com has arrived at just the right time.  There was much discussion about the Artist formerly known as Umbraco as a Service at the Keynote, the Roadmap panel and also at a OpenSpace that was facilitated by Rich Green. With many projects already using Umbraco.com, notably Carlsberg, and the excitement it generated at the keynote, it’s something I look forward to hearing more about. You can expect to see Umbraco.com to be rolled out on the 1st September.

Umbraco 8

Finally, of course I must mention the future release of Umbraco 8. It featured in the keynote and also in the Umbraco road map panel which included a select number of members of the core development team taking questions from the community in regard to the future of Umbraco. What became very clear was that Umbraco 8 was centered around removing legacy code, thus giving the core team more time to develop new features and fix bugs.

You should also see the replacement of numerical ID’s to GUID’s in order to overcome the existing issues around multiple instances and environments. Umbraco 8 will also feature a new cache system which will replace the old single cache with multiple caches for each individual page, thus reducing the load on the server and improving page load times.

The core team have done a significant re-think of the way Umbraco site builders define content types and site structure. The user interface has been notably improved along with the workflow for creating and managing document types. As you can imagine I’m looking forward to hearing more about Umbraco 8 in the next coming months.

Overall I had a great time in at CodeGarden 15.  There were a number of changes to the format of the event - I missed the boat tour, and Umbraco Bingo was a little quieter this year without my wingman @Yackob94.  But there’s no doubt it was still CodeGarden in the best Umbraco tradition. We were told that this would be the last CodeGarden in Copenhagen and next year we’re off to Odense the home of Umbraco HQ.  It’s going to be CodeGarden but not as we know it.