Umbraco User's Guide

B

Setting Up Your Visual Studio Environment

• How do you mimic the Umbraco folder structure?
• How do you set up build events?
• How do you reference the Umbraco libraries?

Editing templates, styles, scripts, and other resources within the Umbraco backoffice is certainly possible, as you have seen throughout the book. However, working with all of these assets and custom code outside of Umbraco is best practice. Luckily, Visual Studio provides you with plenty of toolsets to accomplish this. But why would you want to? Here are a couple reasons:

• Multi-developer environments. If you are working on a team and sharing a single development installation, deployment and code syncing is much easier if the assets are worked out outside of Umbraco.
• Source control integration. As you may know, Microsoft Visual Studio allows you to source control your code with your favorite source control system, such as Subversion, CVS, or Visual SourceSafe.

The instructions in this appendix are specific to Visual Studio 2010 but also apply to Visual Studio 2008. Earlier versions also support similar functionality, but the approach is different.