Did you know there’s an Open Source CMS based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET called Umbraco? I popped along to the first ever Umbraco festival last Friday to find out what the Umbraco community have been up to.

Founder Niels Hartvig set up Umbraco with the intention of making a CMS built on .NET that’s free and available to everyone. His vision is that the more you contribute, the more you get back, so the more people who use Umbraco the more it’ll be improved. His vision statement for  the next version of Umbraco (version 5) is ‘sustainable idealism’.

Alex Norcliffe, lead architect for Umbraco 5 gave a great session to confirm what Version 5 will bring to Umbraco developers. Basically the team is building the Umbraco framework from scratch to keep up with advancements in .NET like MVC3 and clean up the backend – although the existing version 4.5 is working really well, there’s an opportunity to use the experience gained since Umbraco v1.0.

Oh, and the Umbraco Windows Phone 7 application will be launched in November. Named Prodigy, it  allows you to manage your web content via the phone.

The day was rounded off with a session from our very own Martin Beeby – Martin’s keen on Umbraco because; “If it wasn’t for Open Source I’d never figure our how to do anything – it’s a great way to progress as a developer”.

Find out more about Umbraco here.

Perhaps you’re currently working with PHP, Ruby or even classic ASP and want to find out more about the latest versions of ASP.NET and Visual Studio? Then the Microsoft Web Camp on June 4/5 in London could be right up your street. One day spend listening and learning about the technologies followed by a day of hands-on, practical labs and team work. (Web Camps are happening in various locations around the world – in Europe you have the choice of London, Munich or Moscow).

From the website:

“Interested in learning how new innovations in Microsoft’s Web Platform and developer tools like ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 can make you a more productive web developer? If you’re currently working with PHP, Ruby, ASP or older versions of ASP.NET and want to hear how you can create amazing websites more easily, then register for a Web Camp near you today!

Microsoft’s Web Camps are free, two-day events that allow you to learn and build on the Microsoft Web Platform. At camp, you will hear from Microsoft experts on the latest components of the platform, including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Entity Framework, IIS, Visual Studio 2010 and much more.

Web Camps also provide the opportunity to get hands on with labs and get creative by building in teams. All this with Microsoft experts on hand to guide you through.

We look forward to seeing you at camp soon! ”

To find our more or register, visit http://www.webcamps.ms/

1105 What’s really changing is not the technology, it’s who’s doing what, where, with whom. Mobile is critical and the tools exist to build solidly engineered apps, but can we get the design right?

1059 We’ve gone from musicians to artists and Project Gustav – a very natural way for artists to “paint” on a computer

1055 It’s about the social, human aspects and developing and maintaining the skills, not about the technology

1052 My goodness it’s difficult for me to convey anything Bill Buxton says – his brain is wired soooo differently to mine

1050 Natural user interfaces – marrying of skill and interface and application to the task

1048 Drawing comparison with musicians and the important of their tools to their job and the way it reflects on their craft

1045 Bill’s excited, he’s enthusiastic, he’s engaging, I’m just not sure what he wants to tell me yet…

1043 Announcement – the first Twitter Morse Code Mobile App

1041 Bill Buxton appears. Boy Doug Purdy talks fast. I’m not sure I got all that. Might have to re-watch on slomo

1036 Dallas allows you to expose your data under your conditions be it free or chargeable and with your terms of use

Dallas offers discoverability and scalability whoever you are – it’s built on Windows Azure

1029 I have my amazing Web API, how do I make money out of it? Enter Codename “Dallas”

25 new datasets in the Dallas catalog since PDC.

Now exploring the DVD UPC dataset on the Dallas site

And bringing in a NavTec dataset that has information about currently showing movies

Demo app using Netflix, UPC and NavTec data on Windows Phone

1028 Project Houston enables database development / management in the browser

Any SQL Azure DB can be exposed as OData by simply checking a checkbox

1025 The Netflix OData API is hosted in the cloud with Windows Azure with the data in SQL Azure

Now onto building / exposing data via these APIs

1020 Where we’ll see it – in SharePoint2010 every list will be exposed as an OData service and Excel will be able to query against any OData service

Lots of customers, partners, products on screen who are behind OData

http://www.odata.org to get the clients, SDK, documents etc

1008 Stressing the importance of open standard and introducing the Open Data Protocol (OData)

Querying against the Netflix OData API using a standardised query language

Very easy to format as either XML or JSON and then reuse results easily in your app be it server / client

Demo of querying Netflix via JavaScript and rendering results in only a few lines of code

Metadata exposed that allows the API to be explored and they’ve built a visualiser to make it easy to get an overview

Can write a .NET LINQ query and we have support for translation to OData query URL format

Investments made in building client support for OData on various platforms – demo on Palm Pre

Also have client library for iPhone available today

1004 Scott waves goodbye and Doug Purdy takes to the stage to talk about services

0957 Web Platform Installer – makes it really easy to configure your development machine or production server

More that 10M downloads

Also launched the Web Application Gallery with both .NET and PHP apps

We’ll be talking later about a new open source platform called Orchard for blogging etc

WebsiteSpark and BizSpark reducing the barrier to entry in the early stages of building a business

0955 John Resig takes to the stage to talk about partnering with Microsoft

0953 jQuery – lots of initiatives over the last 18 months or so

Intellisense support, including in Visual Studio, integration with ASP.NET, CDN

Announcement: We’ll be contributing to jQuery project as well as making testing resource etc available

Templating engine that Scott demo’d is first part of that

0942 Scott Hanselman takes the stage for a demo of some VS2010 features

• Drag code window to separate monitor
• Search within type names in Intellisense to find things easily
• NavigateTo allows much more sophisticated search than Ctrl-F. Searching more metadata and smart search such as CamelCase
• Block select – modify multiple lines concurrently
• Generate a sequence diagram automatically
• jQuery templates
• Web deployment of different configurations

0940 Making deployment easier, Manage multiple configurations and compose and deploy packages

0940 AJAX Support – improved Intellisense accuracy and performance – many times faster than VS2008

0936 Scott Guthrie takes the stage to talk VS2010

• Full multi-monitor support
• Improved Intellisense and code navigation
• ASP.NET controls emit clean markup. No inline styles. Use CSS to style everything
• Viewstate is smaller
• Semantic markup
• New controls including various chart controls
• ASP.NET MVC 2 built-in with better validation, UI and scaffolding helpers, regions and better tooling

0936 Wow. I think the crowd were genuinely impressed with what they saw of IE9. I know I was.

0935 Did I mention there was a new JavaScript engine?

0930 HTML5 Video support

Playback of YouTube HTML5 video

Comparison of HD video replay in IE9 vs Chrome – lots of frame dropping in Chrome. IE playing 2 4MB HD videos side by side.

Carousel of HTML5 videos with opacity. Composited onto the same drawing surface. IE9 just renders it correctly and performantly via the GPU hardware. Massive difference.

0929 Preview is a lightweight frame around IE9 engine – not fully fledged browser

Developer tools enhanced with network monitoring

0925 Hardware accelerated SVG

Contributing SVG Compliance tests to W3C

IE9 platform preview available for download for community feedback and will be updated about every 8 weeks

0920 Hardware accelerated HTML5 – side by side comparison of IE9 vs Firefox, Chrome

GPU hardware acceleration makes a huge difference – demo of spinning logos showed an order of magnitude difference in perf

SVG supported in IE9 and Developer Tools enhanced to integrate with new features

0911 Standards – Same markup across all browsers. We want to make HTML5 work. in IE9 it will

Set out to support every standard we saw in real world data

Top 7000 sites profiled the script APIs to ensure IE9 supports all those plus additional

eg compatability for addEventListener – same code

CSS3 – 578 of 578 tests passed on CSS3 test site

Announcement: Contributing DOM & CSS3 compliance tests to W3C. >100 to date

0910 Performance – Making use of multiple cores, compiling JavaScript in the background on a separate thread

0905 Dean Hachamovitch takes the stage representing IE

Welcome to Ie9 – HTML5 Hardware Accelerated

To ensure familiar app paradigms run as fast as possible taking advantage of the hardware

What we’ll talk about:

1. Performance
2. IE9 and Standards
3. GPU-Powered HTML5
4. IE9 Previews and Community Feedback
5. Something else to be revealed

IE8 – the most used browser on the web

0904 The lights come down – time to find that backlight for the keyboard again

0903 Please take your seats this ride it about to begin

0902 Another room-full of anticipation as we watch art being created